If the Postal Service refuses to deliver your mail, surely you can sue the government over your losses, right?

Wrong, according to a new Supreme Court opinion.

Tuesday’s 5-4 ruling in U.S. Postal Service v. Konan was authored by Justice Clarence Thomas and joined by all the other Republican appointees except for Justice Neil Gorsuch, who joined Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent.

The case required the justices to interpret the Federal Tort Claims Act — specifically, the part of the act that says the government is immune from claims “arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.”

The question was whether that so-called postal exception applies to intentional failures to deliver mail.

It does, Thomas wrote for the majority.

That interpretation led the court to rule against Lebene Konan, who sought damages for the Postal Service’s allegedly intentional withholding of mail from her two rental properties in Texas. Konan, who is Black, claimed that postal workers withheld delivery for discriminatory reasons. She sued the government for loss of rental income, deprivation of mail and distress the postal workers caused her. She also sued two workers for equal protection violations. ....

But was this case really just about grammar, old dictionaries and newspapers, or were broader considerations at play?

Touting the importance of the postal exception, Thomas wrote that “the frequency of postal workers’ interactions with citizens” means that lawsuits “would arise so often that they would create a significant burden for the Government and the courts. And their cost to taxpayers would depend on the value and importance of the mail’s contents, over which the Government typically has no control.”

But even if ruling for Konan would have meant more suits against the government, “that would not provide this Court with authority to change the text Congress enacted,” Sotomayor wrote. She said that Congress provided only a limited exception and that it’s “not the role of the Judiciary to supplant the choice Congress made because it would have chosen differently.”