Opinion ID: 792232
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Shakman II Decision

Text: 9 Unlike the City of Chicago, several Cook County officials did not become parties to the 1983 Consent Decree. These officials appealed the district court's partial summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs; we reviewed that decision in Shakman II, 829 F.2d 1387. The focus of our decision in Shakman II was the constitutionality of politically-motivated hiring practices; other patronage-based employment practices were not before us. Id. at 1393 (citations omitted). Turning to the merits of the plaintiffs' political hiring claims, we noted that significant changes had occurred since the plaintiffs had filed the original action in 1969: 10 The case before us today is, from a factual viewpoint, a very different case from the case set forth in the complaint. The consent decree with respect to politically-motivated discharges has eliminated a significant portion of the contentions that were originally presented in the appellees' complaint and that were before this court during the earlier appeal in 1970, seventeen years ago. . . . More importantly, we are confronted with a significantly different legal landscape than the one that confronted the district court at the time the complaint was originally filed. . . . During these intervening years, the Supreme Court has engaged in a thorough examination of justiciability, the limitations imposed on federal courts by the case-and-controversy provision of article III. 11 Id. at 1392-93 (emphasis in original; citations omitted). This intervening case law made clear that the central inquiry in determining whether a plaintiff had constitutional standing was whether that plaintiff had suffered `personal injury fairly traceable to the defendant's allegedly unlawful conduct and likely to be redressed by the requested relief.' Id. at 1394 (quoting Allen v. Wright, 468 U.S. 737, 751, 104 S.Ct. 3315, 82 L.Ed.2d 556 (1984)). 12 In applying this standard in Shakman II, we observed that, although the plaintiffs had asserted several injuries, the heart of the plaintiffs' case [wa]s their contention that the hiring practices of the defendants violate[d] the speech and associational rights of candidates and voters. Id. at 1395. We then turned to the question of whether the dilution of voters' political voice was fairly traceable to the defendants' activity. Id. We determined that the line of causation between the appellants' activity and the appellees' asserted injury [was] particularly attenuated; we explained: 13 [T]he line of causation depends upon countless individual decisions. Moreover, those countless individual decisions must depend upon . . . countless individual assessments that those who are in power will stay in power. . . . Any advantage obtained by the incumbent is obtained only if potential workers make an independent evaluation that the incumbent, not the opposition, will win. The plaintiffs will be at a disadvantage if—and only if—a significant number of individuals seeking political job opportunities determines the ins will remain ins. 14 Id. at 1397. However, [t]racing the appellees' asserted injury to the appellants' activity must depend on more than the attempt of a federal court to take the political temperature of the body politic. Id. at 1398 (citation omitted). In sum, the relationship between the defendants' activities and the plaintiffs' injuries were too speculative and tenuous to support Article III standing. Consequently, we held that the plaintiffs did not have standing to pursue their hiring action against the remaining defendants.