Senate Democrats Have Repealed a Controversial Trump-Era Workplace Discrimination Rule
In the final days of the Trump administration, a key civil rights agency published a controversial new rule to help employers sidestep and delay discrimination lawsuits. Because Donald Trump stacked the agency with Republicans whose terms outlasted his own, the policy was set to remain in place through 2022, if not longer. On Wednesday, however, Senate Democrats voted to repeal the Trump rule by a 50–48 vote using the obscure and powerful Congressional Review Act, all but ensuring the rule’s demise. The Senate’s vote marks a defeat for one of the Trump administration’s most sweeping attacks on workers’ rights.
That attack, the conciliation rule, gives employers potent tools to kill off discrimination suits before they even reach a court. It applies to the full range of civil rights claims, covering discrimination on the basis of race, religion, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and more. The policy is ostensibly rooted in federal law, which requires the EEOC to engage in some conciliation—basically, settlement talks—before the agency can file a lawsuit on behalf of a worker. But in 2015’s Mach Mining v. EEOC, the Supreme Court confirmed that this requirement is minimal: It merely compels the EEOC to let the employer discuss and remedy their discriminatory practice. Before Mach Mining, companies tried to drag out settlement talks for years, then challenge their adequacy in court for several more years. The Supreme Court’s decision put an end to that obstruction.
