Word: antonios
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...high-court turnaround came in an obscure case from San Antonio, where the local transit authority challenged the U.S. Labor Department's right to apply federal wage and hour rules to overtime payments of its bus drivers and other employees. A U.S. district judge concluded that public transit was one of the core local functions protected under the 1976 Supreme Court ruling, and that the wages and hours of transit workers were therefore immune to federal regulation. In overturning that finding, Justice Blackmun wrote for the court majority that various federal tribunals had failed utterly to agree on which local...
Union officials in San Antonio and elsewhere were delighted by the new court position, which should result in moderately increased overtime pay for some municipal workers. Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said the decision ends nine years of "second-class citizenship" for public employees. Backers of local autonomy were shocked. "The court sits as arbiter of power among levels and branches of government," complains Lawrence Velvel, former chief counsel of the State and Local Legal Center in Washington. "That's its role. When the majority throws up its hands because...
...replies Columbia University Law Professor Herbert Wechsler, one of the nation's foremost experts on federal-state relations. The San Antonio decision, he says, merely returns the high court to a position that it has held for 50 years. Wechsler argues that the 1976 decision was a "fluke" that the legal system is well rid of. "The Constitution gives Congress the power, without any qualifications, to regulate interstate commerce," the professor notes, "and this is interstate commerce" because the wages and hours of public employees, along with many other local government activities, affect the national economy...
...Burger Court has long been pushed and pulled by an unpredictable, shifting center. During his 14 years on the court, Blackmun, 76, has voted with the court's conservatives on many criminal-justice issues but frequently sided with the liberals on other questions. Some observers see the San Antonio reversal as the latest assertion of independence by a Justice once considered to be a solid member of the conservative bloc. Last week's majority was made up of Centrists Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and Byron White plus Liberals William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall. "You can almost see them getting together...
Washington 105, San Antonio...