Ceballos and Public Speech: Response to Roosevelt

Marty Lederman

There isn't much, if anything, in Kim's post with which I disagree -- including the notion that "academic freedom" is unlikely to be a significant constitutional protection for teacher speech and scholarship (especially in light of the long history of viewpoint-based hiring and tenure decisions).

Kim is absolutely right that the speech that is most important from the perspective of self-governance is speech from the employees to the public, and therefore that Ceballos is not the most disturbing aspect of the Court's government-employee-speech doctrine. Kim writes that "as long as that speech [to the public] is protected, I'm not worried if intragovernmental speech is not." I might share this reaction, if the premise were plausible. But as Kim concedes, the Connick test does not provide very much protection for speech of employees to the public, because that is exactly the speech that is most likely to have an impact on the workplace, thus providing the employer with a strong Connick defense.

Indeed, the limitations of Connick are the least of the problem. These days, the majority of important employee speech to the public is specifically limited by contract, by rules restricting disclosure of classified information, by privilege rules (e.g., attorney-client privilege, deliberative-process privilege, Executive privilege, etc.), and by internal workplace rules, such as those restricting what Supreme Court clerks may disclose to the public. In cases such as Snepp and Morison, the courts have basically held -- not without reason -- that the First Amendment is categorically unavailable to "whistleblowers" when such contractual or classification or privilege rules are present. These rules, and the judicial decisions upholding them and rejecting constitutional defenses out of hand, threaten to render numerous important government processes -- not only cases of wrongdoing but also basic decisions about policy and process -- entirely impervious to disclosure, oversight, public debate and correction. [NOTE: Although I think that such rules are often far too overbroad, I do not think that employees should have the right to simply ignore them. Perhaps this perspective is a function of my tenure at the Office of Legal Counsel. Because of the culture of confidentiality in that office, I would never dream of publicly disclosing classified or attorney-client-protected information that I learned there. Nor do I think that's such a bad thing -- at least so long as the office itself has a presumption of transparency in its decisionmaking, a practice that OLC has followed on occasion and that many of us have urged it to reinstitute.]

This is a particularly dangerous trend in the federal Executive branch, in light of a increasing culture of secrecy characterized by, e.g.:

-- Grossly overbroad use of classification;

-- Aggressive investigation and punishment of leaks (see the recent Mary McCarthy incident, and the new subpoenas to the San Francisco Chronicle);

-- The refusal of the Administration to make public the legal opinions that have authorized the legally controversial tactics used in the current wars;

-- The resistance to congressional oversight, and the assertion of a constitutional power to ignore statutory notification requirements;

-- The assertion of a state-secrets privilege in many recent cases (dealing with, e.g., renditions, torture, the NSA wiretap and phone-records programs, etc.), even where the allegations are that the "secrets" that are classified are with respect to the existence of unlawful programs;

-- The extraordinarily broad arguments made by the SG in the Cheney "task force" case (see here and here), which essentially amounted to an assertion that Congress has virtually no power to regulate -- and thus also no power to oversee -- what occurs in the Executive branch, as long as the internal conduct can be said to have been in the service of the President's power to develop legislative recommendations, to make appointments, to seek opinions from his cabinet heads, to engage in foreign affairs, or to act as Commander-in-Chief;

-- The fairly narrow reach of FOIA and the federal whistleblower statute, at least as construed by the Executive branch and (for the most part) by the courts;

-- The Attorney General's recent in terrorem comments about how the press might be prosecuted for publishing leaks;

-- The current prosecutions in the AIPAC case for disclosure by non-employees of leaked information;

and

-- The alarming and grossly undereported recent decision of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Boehner v. McDermott, holding that disclosure or publication of publicly significant information is not protected by the First Amendment if the disclosure or publication is made with knowledge that it was unlawfully obtained or leaked.

In combination with the pro-employer tilt of Connick itself -- but cf. U.S. v. NTEU -- these trends do not bode well for what Kim rightly identifies as the public-employee speech "that is most important from the perspective of self-governance." And in that light, the Ceballos decision is disheartening, because where public disclosure of alleged government wrongdoing is so fraught with risk of sanction -- and is very unlikely to be deemed constitutionally protected -- the possibility of internal grievance was just about the only modest fallback option for a sincere and well-motivated whistleblower. For the Court now to tell such employees not to worry because the Pickering test might provide some constitutional protection if they go public with their complaints sounds like fairly cynical reassurance to me -- at least until such time as there is some indication from the Court that it is willing to put much more teeth into the constitutional protections for such public disclosure.
Posted 11:34 AM by Marty Lederman [link]