Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick faced tough questions on one of his most appalling dissents from Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin on Wednesday. “You said earlier today you don’t get to pick and choose which Supreme Court precedent you follow,” Durbin noted. Yet in Brett Kavanaugh’s Agriprocessors dissent, Kavanaugh didn’t do that.
“Everyone else who looked at this question—the administrative law judge; the National Labor Relations Board, including the Republican appointees; two appeals court judges, including one Republican appointee—followed the Supreme Court precedent and came to the opposite conclusion that you did,” Durbin continued. And the question Kavanaugh refused to follow Supreme Court precedent on shows his absolute contempt for workers’ rights and immigrants’ rights.
The workers at Agriprocessors had voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers union in 2005. They apparently had good reason to do so. “We were treated like garbage,” one former truck driver at the facility told the Forward in 2008. “We were doing a lot of work for not a lot of money. And if we said anything, we got fired immediately.”
The company tried to block that union effort, taking the case to the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that referees labor disputes. Agriprocessors argued that the undocumented status of most of the workers negated the election results. The company pointed to the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which made it illegal to knowingly hire workers who are in the U.S. illegally.
Kavanaugh agreed that the Immigration Reform and Control Act did take precedence over a 1984 Supreme Court decision which pointed out that “If an employer realizes that there will be no advantage under the NLRA in preferring illegal aliens to legal resident workers, any incentive to hire such illegal aliens is correspondingly lessened.” But, as Durbin pointed out, everyone else making decisions on the Agriprocessors case agreed that the Supreme Court precedent was relevant and that the undocumented workers had the right to unionize.
Kavanaugh has showed us who he is. He thinks undocumented workers aren’t employees, starting the moment they start to fight for better treatment. He thinks workers don’t deserve the most basic protections or rights. And he has long been willing to ignore Supreme Court precedent. Now Donald Trump and Senate Republicans want to put him in a position to overturn Supreme Court precedent.