Judge Kavanaugh would threaten hard-won rights and protections for workers and their families.
Judge Kavanaugh routinely rules against workers and their families.
- AFGE v. Gates ruling favors Bush-era Department of Defense regulations that a lower court warned “entirely eviscerate collective bargaining” and The Washington Post called “some of the most dramatic workplace changes planned for civil service employees in 30 years”
- Venetian Casino Resort, LLC v. NLRB ruling favors a corporation seeking criminal citations for lawful union protests
- Agriprocessor v. NLRB dissent claims undocumented workers cannot vote in union elections, a legal analysis that his fellow judges labeled “absurd”
- Fogo de Chao v. DHS dissent bases the denial of temporary worker visas on policy judgments that, according to his fellow judges, are “squarely in the hands of the Political Branches, not the courts”
- Sea World of Fla. v. Perez dissent excuses Sea World’s failure to protect workers interacting with killer whales
- The list goes on
Judge Kavanaugh routinely rules for discriminatory employers and denies relief to employees.
- Howard v. Office of the Chief Admin. Officer and Rattigan v. Holder dissents dismiss the racial discrimination and retaliation claims of a Black deputy budget director fired by the U.S. House of Representatives and a Black agent subjected to an FBI security investigation
- Miller v. Clinton dissent attacks, in the words of his fellow judges, “the entire edifice of [our] anti-discrimination canon” in allowing the State Department to set a mandatory retirement age for certain employees abroad and terminate them solely based on age
Judge Kavanaugh opposes market competition that helps keep monthly insurance premiums and other health care costs down for Americans, including workers and their families.
- S. v. Anthem dissent, according to his fellow judges, “applies the law as he wishes it were, not as it currently is” in arguing that an Anthem-Cigna merger that would have reduced competition for health care consumers in 14 states should have been approved
Judge Kavanaugh would allow employers to deny vital health care coverage to their employees, and he has criticized the Affordable Care Act.
- Priests for Life v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services dissent argues in favor of employers’ religious beliefs overriding an employee’s right to birth control coverage
- Seven-Sky v. Holder dissent editorializes against the individual mandate and suggests that presidents succeeding Obama would have no obligation to enforce it
- Sissel v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services dissent argues that the full court should consider whether the ACA was constitutionally flawed based on a theory that the majority noted runs counter to “more than a century” of Supreme Court jurisprudence
Federal agencies protect health, safety, and rights in many critical ways that affect the daily lives of workers and their families. Judge Kavanaugh, however, appears likely to limit agencies’ roles regarding the laws they are expressly charged with implementing.
- Argues for limiting judicial deference to agencies’ interpretations of the statutes they administer and for the outright reduction or elimination of some agencies
- Overturned by the Supreme Court in Environmental Protection Agency v. EME Homer City Generation, holding that, in attempting to undermine the EPA, he tried to “improve upon” rather than “apply” federal law
- Overturned by his own D.C. Circuit Court in PHH Corporation v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after he argued that independent agencies like CFPB “pose[d] a significant threat to individual liberty”