People Who Sue People are the Luckiest People... in Obama's Washington

Looks like the first major statute to emerge from the new Democratic Congress- and to be signed by President Barack Obama - will be the Lily Ledbetter law. This law effectively eliminates the statue of limitations in pay discrimination cases. It's being represented as a big victory for women. In fact, it's a huge payday for the plaintiffs bar. Find a woman age 70, who has a smaller pension because she was paid less than a selected male counterpart between 1979 and 1987, before her then-employer was bought by a new company and then merged into a third company. Now challenge the legal successors of her long-ago managers to prove that their predecessors had a valid nondiscriminatory reason for setting her pay as they did. It's impossible. It'll be simpler to pay out. Which is of course the idea. You can tell a lot about a political party by seeing who gets its first attention. For all the talk of "change," the Obama Democrats remain the party that cares first and foremost about people who sue people.