The Postal Service's Recent Supreme Court Win Is Bad News for Government Accountability
Federal officials enjoy too much immunity from being sued over their misconduct.
Greetings and welcome to the latest edition of the Injustice System newsletter. This week's big legal story continues to be last week's judicial evisceration of President Donald Trump's lawless tariff scheme. But the U.S. Supreme Court also issued an important decision on Tuesday in a case about holding federal officials civilly liable for their misconduct. Unfortunately, the feds won that one.
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The Federal Tort Claims Act says that the federal government is immunized from being sued over "claims arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter." But what if a postal worker deliberately misdelivers the mail, such as by intentionally sending it to the wrong address or intentionally returning it to the sender instead of delivering it to the place where it is supposed to go? Is that kind of purposeful malfeasance by a postal worker also shielded from lawsuits?
Writing this week for the 5–4 majority in United States Postal Service v. Konan, Justice Clarence Thomas declared that the statutory protection against being sued should indeed be read to apply "when postal workers intentionally fail to deliver the mail." According to Thomas, "because a 'miscarriage' includes any failure of mail to arrive properly, a person experiences a miscarriage of mail when his mail is delivered to his neighbor, held at the post office, or returned to the sender—regardless of why it happened." Likewise, Thomas argued, "a loss can be the result of another person's intentional misconduct."
In other words, according to Thomas, even if a postal worker deliberately misdelivered the mail for malicious reasons, those malicious reasons are irrelevant to the judicial inquiry in this case.
Writing in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, basically accused Thomas of butchering not only the relevant federal statute but also the plain meaning of words such as "loss" and "miscarriage."
"People lose their mail when it gets stuck behind a drawer, not when they intentionally throw it away," Sotomayor wrote. "The same is true when the Postal Service loses someone's mail. The reason is an error, not deliberate wrongdoing." Similarly, while "the majority is correct that 'miscarriage' covers misconduct by the Postal Service that causes mail to 'fai[l] to arrive properly,'" she argued, "the majority is wrong to extend this meaning to cover situations that involve intentional misconduct."
This dispute over statutory interpretation and deliberately misdelivered mail might not sound like the most urgent of legal issues. But don't lose sight of what the case is fundamentally all about: the government's lack of accountability. Federal officials already enjoy far too much immunity from being sued over their misconduct. This ruling just added to that problem.
