Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley criticized the Supreme Court ruling that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace.
“You know, to me, for someone who has said, Justice Gorsuch, who said that he’s a textualist and an originalist, I just don’t see how you get there with that methodology,” Hawley told the Washington Examiner, about Justice Neil Gorsuch.
In a 6-3 opinion written by Gorsuch Monday, the court ruled that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, and sex, protects gay and transgender workers.
Gorsuch was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the high court’s four liberal-leaning justices.
Hawley, elected to the Senate in 2018 after two years as Missouri’s attorney general, joined many social conservatives in raising doubts about the decision.
“It would have been better to say the text means what it meant when it was written in 1964,” said Hawley, a graduate of Yale Law School and Stanford University.
“You really can’t do that from the bench,” Hawley said. “These decisions have massive scope. This is a huge decision with major repercussions across different fields of law.”
Gorsuch has routinely called himself a textualist, citing a belief in the objective meaning of the legal text as opposed to determining the statutory purpose or legislative intent of it.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the minority, challenged the majority’s opinion, calling it “breathtaking,” in its “arrogance” and jabbed Gorsuch over the meaning of textualism.
“Textualists do not read statutes as if they were messages picked up by a powerful radio telescope from a distant and utterly unknown civilization,” Alito wrote.
