A ruling just released from the U.S. Supreme Court features a hilarious footnote in which Justice Elena Kagan uses logic and reason to remind fellow Justice Brett “I like beer!” Kavanaugh that the law applies to everyone, including large corporations who try to get out of paying their employees.
Mark Joseph Stern of Slate caught the dustup between Kagan and Kavanaugh in a case where Kagan was in the majority on an opinion involving overtime pay for a man who worked 84 hours a week but was denied overtime by his employer.
The case is Helix Energy Solutions v. Hewitt. In it, Michael Hewitt alleged that he often worked as much as 84 hours a week on an offshore oil platform owned by Helix but was only paid a set amount for weekly work, not hourly, even though he clearly exceeded 40 hours work in a week, meaning he was entitled to overtime.
Kavanaugh, along with Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, were in the minority, ruling that Hewitt wasn’t entitled to receive overtime for his work. Kavanaugh also authored the dissenting opinion.
That led Kagan to make the following notation in the footnotes of the majority opinion, clearly aiming her comments at the three justices who had ruled against Hewitt, especially Kavanaugh since he was the author:
“The dissent… tries just to power past the regulatory text. The dissent reasons that because Hewitt received more than $455 for a day’s work, he must have been paid on a salary basis. That is a non-sequitur to end all non-sequiturs. Hewitt’s high daily pay ensured that the HCE rule’s salary-level requirement would not have prevented his exemption: $963 (per day) is indeed more than $455 (per week).”
In another footnote to the majority opinion, Kagan also wrote that Helix had made an argument in their filing before the Supreme Court they failed to make in lower court filings, which would normally mean the high court wouldn’t even consider it in their ruling, and yet Kavanaugh saw fit to “opine on it anyway” in his dissent.