American Thinker: EEOC’s judge-less warrant to Catholic hospital is sign of what’s to come [?]

American Thinker: EEOC’s judge-less warrant to Catholic hospital is sign of what’s to come by Mark J. Fitzgibbons:

The EEOC issued an administrative subpoena to a Catholic hospital system that fired one employee under its no-fault attendance policy. The warrant, which demanded information of all terminations by the faith-based nonprofit healthcare provider, was upheld by a federal court under ridiculously non-existent Fourth Amendment standards.

Trinity Healthcare, a nonprofit Catholic healthcare system with 86 hospitals nationally, fired Simore Hasan. The EEOC charged Trinity with violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, and demanded information about all its employees who had used up their Family Medical Leave time and were terminated.

. . .

Under the non-existent Fourth Amendment standards that have developed for these warrants issued unilaterally by bureaucrats, a federal court in Indiana rolled over for the EEOC.

The message to all employers: firing one employee opens you up to a judge-less warrant from the federal government.

I almost didn’t report this, but I had second thoughts. I admire the writer’s thinking, but the fault here is with the lawyers. If the Fourth Amendment is an issue, and it does apply to subpoenas (see Treatise Chapter 49), they need to raise it. Courts don’t usually make arguments for them.

The case is EEOC v. Trinity Health Corp., 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 60994 (N.D. Ind. May 11, 2015), and it’s a straight-forward application of the law of subpoenas. Apparently the defense never mentioned the Fourth Amendment because the opinion sure doesn’t. No point in getting all worked up over a civil litigation subpoena where the parties don’t even mention the Fourth Amendment. There are also protective orders under F.R.C.P. 26(c) that can be issued for sensitive information or that which would be burdensome to produce.