Texas violated a federal anti-discrimination law protecting veterans by refusing to rehire a former state trooper after he was injured in the Iraq War while serving as a U.S. Army reservist, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5–4 decision on June 29.

The Biden administration had previously urged the court to reject the case, but switched sides during oral arguments on March 29, saying the Texas Court of Appeals erred when it struck down the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) as unconstitutional.

The lower court held that Congress lacks the authority under its war powers to authorize veterans to sue states such as Texas that haven’t consented to be sued.

Passed in 1994, the act requires state and private employers to restore former employees returning from military service to the same position. A newly disabled employee must be given a position of “similar status and pay.”

The thinking behind it was that leaving former service members without a legal remedy for employment discrimination could interfere with the federal government’s ability to provide a strong national defense by making soldiers reluctant to serve, knowing that their job may not be waiting for them when they return.

Petitioner Le Roy Torres sued his former employer in Texas state court in 2017, seeking more than $5 million.

Torres served 18 years in the U.S. Army Reserve while employed as a state trooper for the Texas Department of Public Safety.

After he was deployed to Iraq in 2007, his lungs were damaged by toxic fumes from the now-infamous open-air “burn pits” that were used on military bases to burn everything from trash to ammunition to medicine to human waste.

He was diagnosed with constrictive bronchiolitis, according to his petition (pdf) to the Supreme Court.

Torres was honorably discharged a year after his deployment and asked the department for a job in a different position because his injuries prevented him from performing all of his previous duties as a state trooper.

The department offered him a temporary position in his previous capacity and said he would be fired if he didn’t report for duty.

Instead, Torres resigned and founded Burn Pits 360 with his wife, Rosie. The nonprofit advocates for service members and families of service members who were injured as a result of toxic burn pits while serving their country.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the majority opinion (pdf) in Torres v. Texas Department of Public Safety (court file 20-603), reversing “the judgment of the Texas Court of Appeals and [remanding] the case for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.”

Breyer’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, along with justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Brett Kavanaugh. Kagan also filed a separate concurring opinion.

Justice Clarence Thomas filed a dissenting opinion, which was joined by justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Breyer wrote that the Constitution gives Congress the authority “to raise and support armies” and “to provide and maintain a navy.”

Relying on that authority, Congress enacted the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act. Texas claimed that the act didn’t apply to it because, as a sovereign state, it never consented to be sued.

“This case asks whether states may invoke sovereign immunity as a legal defense to block such suits. In our view, they cannot,” Breyer wrote. “Upon entering the union, the states implicitly agreed that their sovereignty would yield to federal policy to build and keep a national military.

“States thus gave up their immunity from congressionally authorized suits pursuant to the ‘plan of the convention,’ as part of ‘the structure of the original Constitution itself.’”

Breyer was referring to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia that drafted the U.S. Constitution, which replaced the problematic Articles of Confederation that governed the republic in its early days and which the framers thought provided a too decentralized structure for the government.

Thomas pushed back against the majority in his dissenting opinion.

He noted that in Alden v. Maine (1999) the court found “without qualification—that ‘the powers delegated to Congress under Article I of the United States Constitution do not include the power to subject nonconsenting states to private suits for damages in state courts.’”

“No longer,” Thomas continued.

“Today, by adopting contrived interpretations of Alden and the recent decision in PennEast Pipeline Co. v. New Jersey … the court holds that at least two [and perhaps more] Article I ‘war powers’ do, in fact, include ‘the power to subject nonconsenting states to private suits for damages in state courts,’ … and that Congress has exercised that power by enacting” USERRA.

The attorney for Torres welcomed the new ruling.

“We thank the justices for their thoughtful and well-reasoned opinion that will ensure all service members have the same rights under USERRA; a statute designed to protect them all, not just some, from acts of discrimination by their employers, including state agencies,” Brian Lawler of Pilot Law in San Diego told The Epoch Times by email.

“This journey is not over for [retired Captain] Torres, it is just beginning as we now move to Texas to try his case on the merits.”

The Epoch Times reached out for comment to Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone II, who represents the state in the Supreme Court, but he did not respond as of press time.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared June 29, 2022, in The Epoch Times.

Photo shows Justice Stephen Breyer.