Opinion ID: 548914
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Exceptions to Mootness.

Text: 16 Appellees argue that even if the case is superficially moot, it falls within two exceptions to the doctrine--the common one for actions capable of repetition yet evading review, and the related but narrower one addressing a defendant's voluntary cessation of the offending conduct. Both exceptions involve instances where, despite the apparent demise of the controversy, its resolution has a reasonable chance of affecting the parties' future relations. 4 17 Common to both exceptions is the task of defining the wrong that the defendant is alleged to have inflicted. What is the injury that is capable of repetition, and what are the old ways to which the voluntarily ceasing defendant might return? See United States v. W.T. Grant Co., 345 U.S. 629, 632, 73 S.Ct. 894, 897, 97 L.Ed. 1303 (1953) (voluntary cessation exception rooted in interest in protecting plaintiff from defendant's possible return to his old ways). The opportunities for manipulation are great. The more broadly we define the wrongful conduct, the more numerous are the possible examples, and the greater the likelihood of repetition. Of course there are practical limits. As the defined injury is broadened, it is likely to sweep up actions that last a long time and thus do not evade review. Here, for example, if we defined the alleged wrong as conditioning funding upon legislators' performance of the expressive conduct inherent in legislation, the action would by no means evade review, as Congress often embeds such conditions in permanent legislation. See, e.g., 23 U.S.C. Sec. 158 (1988) (withholding a percentage of federal highway funds from states that do not prohibit those under 21 from buying alcohol); 47 U.S.C. Sec. 399 (1982) (prohibiting any noncommercial educational broadcasting station that receives federal funds from editorializing or endorsing candidates). 18 The United States would define the alleged injury as congressional use of funding to induce appellees to enact specific language allowing religiously affiliated institutions to discriminate against homosexuals. But facts completely irrelevant to any intelligible formulation of plaintiffs' claim--such as the specific issue on which Congress sought to induce plaintiffs' votes--are equally irrelevant to the mootness issue. See Amalgamated Transit Union, AFL-CIO v. Brock, 809 F.2d 909, 914-15 (D.C.Cir.1987). 19 In their brief opposing mootness, appellees appear to wobble in their notion of the injury. At one point they frame the issue as whether Congress can coerce the Council Members' votes by withholding appropriated funds, Brief for Appellees at 31, while elsewhere they speak of Congress's attempt[ing] to coerce the Council Members into voting to adopt a prescribed law, id. at 24 (emphasis added), thus seeming to echo their complaint's focus on Congress's insistence on enactment of specific language. In any event, where plaintiffs are resisting a mootness claim we think they must be estopped to assert a broader notion of their injury than the one on which they originally sought relief. Cf. Tallahassee Memorial Regional Med. Ctr. v. Bowen, 815 F.2d 1435, 1449-50 & n. 28 (11th Cir.1987) (looking to complaint to determine scope of plaintiff's alleged injury). 20 Here the plaintiffs never sought a broad invalidation of conditioned funding generally. Indeed, they made no claim at all against the other provisions in the 1989 Act that conditioned funds on District legislation but refrained from demanding specific language. See, e.g., Pub.L. No. 100-462, Sec. 141, 102 Stat. at 2269-13 (conditioning expenditure of funds on the D.C. government's implementing a preference system that does not preclude the hiring of noncity residents); id., Sec. 143, 102 Stat. at 2269-13 (conditioning all funds on the District's repealing an existing law prohibiting testing for AIDS as a condition of acquiring insurance, and passing another to allow for such testing); id., Federal Payment to the District of Columbia, 102 Stat. at 2269 (conditioning $430 million on the District's maintaining a police force of at least 3880 officers). 21 Instead, appellees attacked the Armstrong Amendment as violating their First Amendment rights by conditioning funds on their enactment of particular language. Count III of the Complaint, the one relevant here, is titled Violation of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment by Coercing Particular Speech by the Members of the Council. Joint Appendix 32 (emphasis added). It goes on to argue that [t]he Armstrong Amendment coerces plaintiffs to propose and to vote in favor of amending the D.C. Human Rights Act, using the particular language dictated by Congress. Id. at p 61 (emphasis added); see also id. at p 62 (A law compelling particular speech, especially particular political speech, is presumptively invalid....). 22 It may well be appropriate to narrow the injury or conduct still further, by reference to (1) the especially coercive character of Congress's having conditioned all District appropriations on enactment of the required legislation, and (2) the gratuitous character of its use of conditioned funding to do something it could easily have done by direct exercise of its plenary power over the District. Count III speaks of the Armstrong Amendment's having coerced the plaintiffs into adopting the specified legislation, id., and earlier argues that by threatening to freeze all District expenditures, the Armstrong Amendment coerces plaintiffs' votes, id. at p 33; so perhaps Count III used coerc[ion] in that very specific sense. Also, Count III explicitly says that Congress failed to proceed in a manner designed to constitute the least possible interference with free speech, id. at p 62, seemingly invoking Congress's alternative option. We need not resolve whether these were essential to plaintiffs' original theory of their claim, however, as we find below that even the injurious act as more broadly conceived--conditioning funding on enactment of legislation in specific language--is not capable of repetition yet evading review and cannot properly be characterized as conduct that the defendants have voluntarily ceased. 23 Capable of repetition, yet evading review. In order to fit the case into one of the exceptional situations to which this doctrine applies, see Continental Bank, 110 S.Ct. at 1255 (quoting Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95, 109, 103 S.Ct. 1660, 1669, 75 L.Ed.2d 675 (1983)), appellees must demonstrate that (1) the challenged action is in its duration too short to be fully litigated prior to its cessation or expiration, and (2) there [is] a reasonable expectation that the same complaining party would be subjected to the same action again. Murphy v. Hunt, 455 U.S. 478, 482, 102 S.Ct. 1181, 1183, 71 L.Ed.2d 353 (1982) (quoting Weinstein v. Bradford, 423 U.S. 147, 149, 96 S.Ct. 347, 348-49, 46 L.Ed.2d 350 (1975)); see also Honig v. Doe, 484 U.S. 305, 318-20, 108 S.Ct. 592, 601-02, 98 L.Ed.2d 686 (1988). Whatever the precise meaning of reasonable expectation, compare Honig, 484 U.S. at 318-19 n. 6, 108 S.Ct. at 601-02 n. 6 (1988) (opinion of Brennan, J., for the Court), with id. at 333-36, 108 S.Ct. at 609-11 (Scalia, J., dissenting), appellees have not shown it. 24 In estimating the likelihood of an event's occurring in the future, a natural starting point is how often it has occurred in the past. Here, the Armstrong Amendment represents the sole occasion on which Congress has used conditioned funding to induce the D.C. Council (or any other government, so far as appears) to enact particular language into law. The amendment thus was, as a member of this court put it at oral argument, a purple cow. We have no reason at all to expect to see one ever again, especially as Congress is free to avoid problems of the present sort by amending the D.C.Code directly. 25 It is true that Senator Armstrong stated at one point that he was tempted to simply offer the same amendment again. 135 Cong.Rec. S11104 (daily ed. Sept. 14, 1989). The resisted temptations of one senator, however, even if expressed on the floor of Congress, are hardly a good barometer of the likelihood of a congressional repeat. 26 Further, even if Congress were again to try to induce enactment of precisely worded legislation by means of conditioned funding, the effort would not necessarily evade review, or even be especially likely to do so. Congress often embeds a conditioned funding mechanism in permanent law. See p. 703 above. There is no reason to think that conditions exacting particular language are systematically linked with short-lived appropriations; with only one instance, there is no way to generalize. 27 Voluntary cessation. Early cases developing the exception for a defendant's voluntary cessation focused on preventing a private defendant from manipulating the judicial process by voluntarily ceasing the complained of activity, and then seeking a dismissal of the case, thus securing freedom to return to his old ways. See, e.g., W.T. Grant, 345 U.S. at 632, 73 S.Ct. at 897; United States v. Trans-Missouri Freight Ass'n, 166 U.S. 290, 308-09, 17 S.Ct. 540, 546-47, 41 L.Ed. 1007 (1897); cf. Goshen Mfg. Co. v. Hubert A. Myers Mfg. Co., 242 U.S. 202, 207-08, 37 S.Ct. 105, 106-07, 61 L.Ed. 248 (1916). See also Wright, Miller & Cooper, Federal Practice and Procedure, Sec. 3533.5 at 326 (1984). Even assuming Congress could properly be classified as a defendant in this action (which we doubt), the argument fails. 28 Although the doctrine has more recently been applied to legislative bodies, see, e.g., City of Mesquite v. Aladdin's Castle, Inc., 455 U.S. 283, 289, 102 S.Ct. 1070, 1074-75, 71 L.Ed.2d 152 (1982); Quern v. Mandley, 436 U.S. 725, 733-34 n. 7, 98 S.Ct. 2068, 2074 n. 7, 56 L.Ed.2d 658 (1978), appellees point to no case applying the doctrine to Congress, and we have found none. We have serious doubts whether it could be. At least in the absence of overwhelming evidence (and perhaps not then), it would seem inappropriate for the courts either to impute such manipulative conduct to a coordinate branch of government, or to apply against that branch a doctrine that appears to rest on the likelihood of a manipulative purpose. 29 Although the Supreme Court seems not to have addressed the issue, we think it telling that it failed even to mention voluntary cessation in a case where, if it encompassed Congress, the doctrine would be highly relevant. In Department of Treasury v. Galioto, 477 U.S. 556, 106 S.Ct. 2683, 91 L.Ed.2d 459 (1986), the Court dismissed as moot a challenge to statutes effectively denying anyone who had been committed to a mental institution access to firearms. While the case was pending before the Supreme Court, Congress amended the law to provide an administrative remedy for those affected. There, as in Quern and City of Mesquite, Congress was free to return to its old ways when the action was dismissed. 30 We need not decide the issue, however, for we find that non-reenactment of a one-time condition that expired of its own terms cannot be viewed as cessation of conduct. In every case applying the voluntary cessation doctrine, the decision to stop the disputed activity was made while the litigation was pending, by, for example, altering an ordinance, City of Mesquite, withdrawing from a federal program, Quern, or resigning from boards of competing companies, W.T. Grant. Here, the expiration date of the 1989 Act was set well before this dispute arose, and was chosen for reasons having nothing to do with the Armstrong Amendment. (Nor, of course, did the brief extensions of the 1989 Act arise from the amendment or its litigation.) In essence, Congress shot an arrow into the air, and it fell to earth. It stretches the words beyond recognition to say that Congress voluntarily ceased anything merely because it refrained from shooting some more arrows after the first landed. More important, extension of the doctrine to this case would not fit its basic theory. While the cessation of an ongoing activity pending a lawsuit may well imply an intent to renew the activity once the court has dropped out, this is hardly true of Congress's allowing a one-time provision to pass into history by its own terms. 31 Appellees make much of a claim that Congress's non-renewal of the Armstrong Amendment was moved by a purpose to evade judicial review. We will assume arguendo that such a purpose played a significant role in the decision. But as Congress possesses an indisputably valid procedure for achieving its substantive purposes (namely, direct amendment of the D.C.Code), its nonrenewal of the disputed procedure hardly suggests either the manipulative purpose, or the risk of recurrence, that drives the voluntary cessation exception. Cf. Flynt v. Weinberger, 762 F.2d 134, 135 n. 1 (D.C.Cir.1985) (declining to apply voluntary cessation doctrine where the challenged act is short-term in nature and discontinued after having achieved its objective).