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Nature of Suit Code: 890
Nature of Suit: Other Statutory Actions
Cause of Action: 

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In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 14-1792

ROBIN ALLMAN, et al.,

Plaintiffs-Appellees,

v.

KEVIN SMITH and CITY OF ANDERSON, INDIANA,

Defendants-Appellants.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Southern District of Indiana, Indianapolis Division.

No. 1:12-cv-0568-TWP-DML — Tanya Walton Pratt, Judge.

____________________

ARGUED MAY 22, 2015 — DECIDED JUNE 24, 2015

____________________

Before EASTERBROOK, WILLIAMS, and HAMILTON, Circuit 

Judges.

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. After being elected Mayor of 

Anderson, Indiana, a city of about 56,000 people, Kevin 

Smith replaced many members of the City’s staff with his 

political supporters or persons he deemed trustworthy.

Eleven of the fired workers filed this suit under 42 U.S.C. 

§1983, contending that the discharges violated the First 

Amendment as understood in Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347 

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2 No. 14-1792

(1976). The district judge concluded that all plaintiffs have 

enough evidence to require a trial but that Mayor Smith is 

entitled to qualified immunity with respect to nine of the 

eleven plaintiffs’ claims. 6 F. Supp. 3d 889 (S.D. Ind. 2014).

The Mayor has appealed from the adverse portion of this 

interlocutory decision, relying on Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 

511 (1985), and its successors. Surprisingly, the City also has 

appealed, even though as a municipal body it is not entitled 

to any form of immunity and is outside Mitchell’s ambit. The 

City invokes the doctrine of “pendent appellate jurisdiction,” which barely survived its scathing treatment in Swint 

v. Chambers County Commission, 514 U.S. 35 (1995), and today 

allows a court of appeals to review an interlocutory order

only when it is “inextricably intertwined” with an appealable decision. Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681, 707 n.41 (1997).

The City maintains that its attempt to have the plaintiffs’ 

claims dismissed on the merits is “inextricably intertwined” 

with the Mayor’s attempt to be free of the risk of damages 

liability, but the contentions are not “intertwined” at all, let 

alone “inextricably” so. Mitchell described an immunity appeal as “conceptually distinct from the merits” (472 U.S. at 

527), which the Court saw as an essential condition of interlocutory review. It is not only possible but also normal to resolve a defendant’s request for qualified immunity without 

deciding the merits of a plaintiff’s claim. See Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 231–43 (2009).

The principal question in an immunity appeal is whether 

uncertainty in legal doctrine makes it inappropriate to 

award damages against a public official—that is, whether 

the law was “clearly established” before the official acted. 

See, e.g., San Francisco v. Sheehan, 135 S. Ct. 1765, 1774–78 

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No. 14-1792 3

(2015); Wilson v. Layne, 526 U.S. 603, 618 (1999). A general 

principle does not support personal liability; instead the 

law’s application to a type of situation must be developed 

enough to “place[] the statutory or constitutional question 

beyond debate.” Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, 131 S. Ct. 2074, 2083

(2011), quoted in Sheehan, 135 S. Ct. at 1774. The question on 

the merits, by contrast, concerns who is in the right, not how 

much legal uncertainty must be cleared away to find the answer. The district judge held that factual investigation, perhaps including a trial, is necessary to determine whether the 

plaintiffs’ rights under the First Amendment have been violated. We therefore limit the appeal to Mayor Smith’s arguments about the only two plaintiffs with respect to whom 

the district judge denied his request for immunity: Robin 

Allman and Margaret Baugher.

When Smith was elected, Allman was Office Manager for 

the Utility Department. That position includes planning, organization, and other tasks that the parties agree are vital to 

an elected official’s ability to carry out his platform, and so

entitle elected officials to use political criteria to decide who 

holds the job. See generally Branti v. Finkel, 445 U.S. 507, 518

(1980) (describing the sort of positions for which “party affiliation is an appropriate requirement for the effective performance of the public office”). Smith told Allman that he 

would not retain her as the Office Manager; she then exercised her seniority (she had worked for the City for 20 years) 

to move to an open position as a cashier in the Utility Department. That transfer took effect on December 27, 2011. 

When Mayor Smith took office on January 3, 2012, he “promoted” her back to Office Manager and immediately sacked 

her.

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The parties agree that the position of cashier is not politically sensitive and that Elrod forbids the use of politics when 

filling it. Mayor Smith does not contend that he would be 

entitled to immunity had he cashiered a cashier. But he contends that Allman was not properly a cashier because political considerations influenced both her hiring as Office Manager and her transfer to the cashier’s position; according to 

Mayor Smith, this meant that Allman was still the Office 

Manager when he took office and could be removed consistent with Elrod and Branti. Allman maintains, to the contrary, that the cashier’s position had been properly posted as 

open in November 2011, that her transfer satisfied all of the 

City’s rules, and that the reason she sought the transfer is 

irrelevant.

This description of the controversy shows that it has 

nothing to do with uncertainty in federal law, and thus nothing to do with qualified immunity. The only disputed question is one of state or local law (which may be influenced by 

the resolution of factual disputes about how and why the 

transfer occurred): whether Allman properly occupied a 

cashier’s position. It follows that Mayor Smith is not entitled 

to interlocutory review with respect to Allman’s situation. 

Johnson v. Jones, 515 U.S. 304 (1995), holds that qualifiedimmunity appeals under Mitchell are limited to determining 

whether the legal issue is subject to uncertainty and do not 

support review of antecedent questions. The antecedent 

question in Johnson was whether the plaintiff or the defendant had correctly described the facts of the controversy; the 

Court held that resolution of factual questions had to await 

appeal from a final judgment, even if one possible resolution 

would have brought a legal issue to the fore. In Allman’s 

situation the antecedent question is whether her appointCase: 14-1792 Document: 44 Filed: 06/24/2015 Pages: 9
No. 14-1792 5

ment to the cashier’s position was valid. No matter how that 

comes out, the court will not need to resolve a disputed 

question of federal law. Johnson makes it easy to see that 

Mayor Smith is not entitled to interlocutory review of the 

question whether Allman was entitled to be a cashier. That’s 

the whole case, not (as Mitchell requires) an issue conceptually distinct from the merits.

Margaret Baugher, the other ex-employee involved in 

this appeal, “worked as Customer Service Supervisor in the 

City’s Utility Department. She reported to the Assistant 

Manager for the Utility Department. As Customer Service 

Supervisor, Ms. Baugher was responsible for directing personnel, assisting customers, and making billing adjustments, 

as well as receiving and responding to customer inquiries 

and complaints, assisting customers in initiating and terminating services, and coordinating new sewer and storm water accounts with the appropriate City department.” 6 F. 

Supp. 3d at 894. This customer-service job was not the top of 

the Utility Department, or even a deputy, but the third level 

on the organization chart. The district judge wrote: “Ms. 

Baugher mainly interacted with co-workers and members of 

the general public, not high level city officials. Her main duties consisted of complying with department policies and 

rules, not developing such policies, and the information she 

was charged with keeping confidential was not politically 

sensitive information. Unless there is additional evidence 

provided to the contrary at trial, it appears that Ms. Baugher’s position falls outside of the exemption for First 

Amendment protection, thus summary judgment on her 

claim is not warranted.” Id. at 902.

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This court has urged district judges to use job descriptions, whenever possible, to apply Elrod and Branti, see Riley 

v. Blagojevich, 425 F.3d 357 (7th Cir. 2005), and Mayor Smith 

observes that the job description for Baugher’s position mentions the possibility that the Customer Service Supervisor 

might have to run the Department if all higher positions 

should be unfilled or unable to act. The record does not 

show that this has ever happened, however, and if a remote 

possibility that a subordinate might need to act as a caretaker were enough to make politics a legitimate qualification for 

the post, then Elrod would be overthrown—for if a disaster 

of sufficient proportions struck, even a garbage collector 

might find himself the highest remaining worker in a city’s 

department of sanitation.

Branti holds that an assistant public defender cannot be 

fired on political grounds, although the public defender, 

charged with setting policy for the office, might be. By 

Mayor Smith’s lights, Branti should have come out the other 

way, because it was possible that an assistant might have to 

perform the chief’s duties if that office became vacant or the 

chief was unable to act. But that’s not how the Court approached the case. Nor is it how we approached the question 

whether the #2 position in a large bureaucracy (Chicago’s 

Water Department) could be removed on political grounds. 

We asked in Tomczak v. Chicago, 765 F.2d 633 (7th Cir. 1985), 

what the First Deputy Commissioner usually did, not what 

duties were conceivable under unlikely conditions. The First 

Deputy Commissioner of Chicago’s Water Department regularly made policy (or exercised politically sensitive discretion), and it followed that he could be replaced on political 

grounds. That can’t be said about Baugher’s job (the third 

tier in a small organization)—and Mayor Smith does not say 

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No. 14-1792 7

it. He does not contend that she regularly, or indeed ever, 

made policy or exercised politically sensitive discretion, such 

as which street’s potholes get filled or what ward’s snow 

gets plowed.

Now if the job description said that she did do those

things, then Mayor Smith would be entitled to immunity 

even if it turned out that the description was inaccurate. A 

newly elected mayor needs to rely on published criteria to 

know which positions can be filled on political grounds. For 

the federal government, United States Government Policy and 

Supporting Positions (the “Plum Book”) identifies the 7,000 or 

so posts eligible for presidential selection or discretionary 

replacement by presidential appointees. Many states and local governments have similar rosters, and people whose jobs 

are in such a catalog are not well situated to complain when 

replaced. They certainly cannot obtain damages from an 

elected official who relies on a published list. But the City of 

Anderson does not have a local version of the Plum Book. A

mayor who equates a worker’s possible duties (e.g., acting 

for the top official if all higher positions on the organization 

chart are vacant) with the worker’s normal duties (e.g., processing complaints about overbilling or failure to credit 

payments) cannot claim immunity, because Branti and decisions such as Tomczak and Riley establish that it is the position’s normal duties that matter.

As a fallback, Mayor Smith contends that anyone responsible for dealing with citizens’ complaints may be hired or 

fired on political grounds, for if such a person insults people, 

or is lazy, or refuses to act on legitimate grievances, that reflects poorly on the administration, and a loss of public confidence undermines its ability to carry out its political proCase: 14-1792 Document: 44 Filed: 06/24/2015 Pages: 9
8 No. 14-1792

gram (or be re-elected). For this, Mayor Smith relies principally on Selch v. Letts, 5 F.3d 1040 (7th Cir. 1993), which 

holds that political affiliation is an appropriate requirement 

for the position of subdistrict superintendent at the Indiana 

Department of Highways.

Responding to complaints was one aspect of a subdistrict 

superintendent’s job, but it mattered to the decision what 

those complaints concerned—and how the subdistrict superintendents could deal with them. Each subdistrict could set 

an independent agenda about road repairs and maintenance, 

including snow removal. Subdistrict superintendents had 

“almost unbridled authority to determine where and when 

... work was to be done” (id. at 1045). The ability to deliver 

public services is vital to the success of any mayor or governor, and Selch reported that the quality of public services 

had been an issue in the gubernatorial election that led to 

Selch’s replacement. It is therefore understandable that a 

person with “unbridled authority” to determine where and 

when road-related services are provided must be someone 

the Governor can trust. That subdistrict superintendents 

sometimes acted in response to complaints was a sidelight; 

what mattered was their discretion over matters of high political salience.

Mayor Smith does not contend that the Customer Service 

Supervisor of the Utility Department has unbridled, or indeed any significant, discretion over matters of high political 

value. Customer-service positions are ubiquitous in the 

economy; people who call AT&T to complain about a telephone bill hope to be well treated, but they do not imagine 

that they are speaking to people with policy-making discretion. True, if a customer-service supervisor fouls up, that 

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No. 14-1792 9

will redound to the employer’s detriment. But that’s true of 

almost every employee. If a road maintenance worker falls 

asleep on the job, or a postal letter carrier tramples a flower 

bed, citizens may be furious and the government will fall in 

public esteem. Yet Elrod holds that politics may not be a 

ground of replacing road maintenance workers and similar 

positions that do not entail political discretion. That’s equally true of customer-service supervisors.

The district judge recognized that a trial might show that 

Baugher has more discretion than her job description implies, and if so it may turn out in Branti’s words that “party 

affiliation is an appropriate requirement for the effective performance of the public office”. All we have to go on now, 

however, is the job description. Johnson v. Jones prevents any 

deeper inquiry. Selch and other decisions we have mentioned clearly establish that a person whose main duties are 

managing a clerical staff that handles customer complaints—

who has limited operational discretion but no significant 

policy-making discretion—cannot be fired on political 

grounds.

The appeal is dismissed to the extent it concerns the City 

of Anderson or Robin Allman’s claim. The district court’s 

decision that Mayor Smith is not entitled to qualified immunity on Margaret Baugher’s claim is affirmed.

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