What did the Supreme Court of the United States say?

Yesterday, enhydra lutis posted one of those wonderful Monday open thread essays. http://caucus99percent.com/content/february-27-2017-open-thread-internat...

Yesterday being February 27, the essay was a riff on the number 27 and the date February 27. Among the many interesting items the essay mentioned were two Supreme Court cases decided on February 27, 1922 and February 27, 1939, respectively. The way the essay described the SCOTUS decisions piqued my curiosity. I thought some of you might be interested in what I found upon consulting Mr. Google.

1. Lester v. Garnett 258 U.S. 130 (1922); https://casetext.com/case/leser-v-garnett (text of case); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leser_v._Garnett

The issue: Had the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women an equal right to vote, really become part of the Constitution of the United States? TWO women registered to vote in Maryland, where the state constitution had limited suffrage to men. Some Marylander yoyo named Oscar Leser and some of his Maryland buds (from the pre-historic section of Maryland apparently) were so arsed about that that they literally made a federal case out of it.

They sued, demanding that the women's names be removed from the rolls of Marylanders who were registered to vote on the ground that the Nineteenth Amendment had not been eligible to become part of the COTUS, citing that dumb reason and two other dumb reasons. The SCOTUS knocked down all three.

Yes, some people wanted to deny women the vote that much. FYI, poopyheads of the world: Fighting for your rights means exactly that. Fighting for your rights doesn't mean fighting to take rights away from people who just got them. That's not about your rights. It's about your ego, or your insecurity or your hate or your flailing or your whatever, but your obsessive zeal to deprive others of their hard-won rights is not about your rights. Capisce?

Just for the record, this Time article about the Leser case is dumb. http://time.com/3716603/leser-v-garnett/ The author claims that the right of women to vote was not secured (whatever that means) until Leser v. Garnett was decided. The idea that a Constitutional amendment that has been ratified is in jeopardy because some asshats in Maryland trumped up a lawsuit is laughable. It's unreal that so many writers can't get arrested while others somehow manage to get paid for writing utter nonsense.

NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp., 306 U.S. 240 (1939); https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/306/240/case.html (text of case); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLRB_v._Fansteel_Metallurgical_Corp.

The issue: Had the National Labor Relations Act given the National Labor Relations Board power to reinstate employees who had been fired after seizing the employer's buildings for a sit down strike and the employees who had abetted them?

The employer, Fansteel, engaged in certain unfair labor practices. Employees of Fansteel held a "sit down" strike, taking possession of the employer's buildings while they were at it. Other employees of Fansteel abetted the strikers. Unless labor laws say differently, your employer is, of course, entitled to fire you if you take possession of its property and/or refuse to work. And Fansteel didindeed fire the lot of them, including the abettors. (OT: I wonder if Fansteel ramping up to supply Great Britain, despite the Neutrality Acts of the 1930s?)

The matter went to the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB ordered the employer to reinstate the fired employees. The employer appealed the decision of the NLRB. The SCOTUS held that the National Labor Relations Act passed by Congress as part of the New Deal did not protect any of the employees from dismissal for participating in and/or abetting an unlawful strike. Therefore the NLRB did not have any statutory power to order the employer to reinstate employees who had been fired for participating in a sit down strike. The case involved a couple of lesser issues as well, but I didn't try drilling down into them because, by then, my eyelashes had begun to hurt.

Yes, some people hate work actions that much, even though work actions are just about the only leverage employees have against an employer. (I really went off the neoliberal suck ups at MSNBC when they crossed picket lines to get on camera to talk scab Democrat to at us, without once even mentioning the existence of the strike. And we think msm don't act in accordance with marching orders from their bosses? Anyway....) To be fair, seizing control of Fansteel's buildings may have gone too far. But, that my friends, was 1939. Today, such union workers that remain in the private sector outside are probably way too scared to strike anyway. Damn!