Congressional Democrats are vowing to move legislation responding to yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that workers cannot sue under a core civil rights law for wage discrimination that happened years earlier.

The high court ruled 5-4 in the case of Ledbetter v. Goodyear that a Goodyear employee who said she was paid less than comparable male employees during her 1979-98 career could not sue under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The court held that Lily Ledbetter’s claim was not valid because she did not file a formal complaint within 180 days after the alleged discrimination occurred, the statutory limit. Ledbetter said the wage difference emerged over a period of years, not months.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg urged Congress to address the timing issue. “Pay disparities often occur, as they did in Ledbetter’s case, in small increments; cause to suspect that discrimination is at work develops only over time,” Ginsburg wrote.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said she would introduce legislation “to clarify congressional intent” in the matter, and Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chairman Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., vowed to “restore full protection against wage discrimination.”

George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said the “This ruling will force Congress to clarify the law’s intention that the ongoing effects of discriminatory decisions are just as unacceptable as the decisions themselves.”