Opinion ID: 2974814
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Myers’s First Amendment Claim

Text: Myers claims that Dean’s termination of her employment violated her First Amendment right to run for political office. The district court found, however, that this court’s holding in Carver v. Dennis, 104 F.3d 847 (6th Cir. 1997), forecloses Myers’s First Amendment claim. Myers now urges us to distinguish, limit, or overrule Carver. 3 The facts of Carver are nearly identical to those of the instant case. Denise Carver (“Carver”), a deputy clerk and at-will employee of a Tennessee county court, announced that she planned to run in the next election against Mildred Dennis (“Dennis”), the county clerk and Carver’s supervisor. 104 F.3d at 848. The next day, Dennis laid off Carver, whom she replaced one month later. Dennis conceded that she would not have fired Carver had Carver not stated her intention to run against Dennis. Carver sued Dennis, claiming a First Amendment violation. The district court granted summary judgment in Dennis’s favor, finding that Carver was fired for her political activity, not for her political views, and that her First Amendment right to engage in such activity was outweighed by Dennis’s interest in preserving a viable working environment in the clerk’s office. See id. On appeal, a panel of this court considered “whether . . . a deputy county clerk who was an at-will employee . . . had a First Amendment right to run against the incumbent clerk in the next election and still retain her job,” and answered in the negative, emphasizing that Carver’s dismissal was motivated solely by her candidacy for her boss’s position and not by her “political beliefs or affiliations”—that it was, in other words, “not a dismissal based on politics at all, except to the extent that running for public office is a political exercise in its broad sense.” Id. at 849-50. Accordingly, and because “the [Supreme] Court has never recognized a fundamental right to express one’s political views through candidacy,” id. at 850-51, the Carver court held that “no reading of the First Amendment required Dennis to retain Carver after Carver announced her intention to run against Dennis for Dennis’s office.” Id. at 853. Myers argues that the Carver holding appears inconsistent with a First Amendment right to support the candidate of one’s choice. In essence, Carver established an exception to that general rule for cases in which the employee herself is a candidate, with the result that an employee in 4 Myers’s position is protected from retaliation for supporting any candidate other than herself. As many of our sister circuits have held, however, “[d]isciplinary action discouraging a candidate’s bid for elective office represent[s] punishment by the state based on the content of a communicative act protected by the [F]irst [A]mendment.” Finkelstein v. Bergna, 924 F.2d 1449, 1453 (9th Cir.) (emphasis added) (internal quotation marks and brackets omitted), cert. denied, 502 U.S. 818 (1991). See also Stiles v. Blunt, 912 F.2d 260, 265 (8th Cir. 1990) (recognizing “the right to run for public office”), cert. denied, 499 U.S. 919 (1991); Flinn v. Gordon, 775 F.2d 1551, 1554 (11th Cir. 1985) (“[H]e certainly had a constitutional right to run for office and to hold office once elected . . . .”), cert. denied, 476 U.S. 1116 (1986); Washington v. Finlay, 664 F.2d 913, 927-28 (4th Cir. 1981) (recognizing “[t]he [F]irst [A]mendment’s protection of the freedom of association and of the rights to run for office, have one’s name on the ballot, and present one’s views to the electorate”), cert. denied, 457 U.S. 1120 (1982); Newcomb v. Brennan, 558 F.2d 825, 829 (7th Cir.) (holding that the “plaintiff’s interest in running for Congress and thereby expressing his political views without interference from state officials . . . lies at the core of the values protected by the First Amendment”), cert. denied, 434 U.S. 968 (1977); Magill v. Lynch, 560 F.2d 22, 27 (1st Cir. 1977) (“It appears that the government may place limits on campaigning by public employees if the limits substantially serve government interests that are important enough to outweigh the employees’ First Amendment rights.” (emphasis added)), cert. denied, 434 U.S. 1063 (1978). Notwithstanding the strength of Myers’s argument and other circuits’ holdings, we are bound by Carver. See United States v. Newsom, 452 F.3d 593, 607 (6th Cir. 2006); United States v. McDaniel, 398 F.3d 540, 549 n.7 (6th Cir. 2005). We therefore AFFIRM the district court’s judgment. 5