Opinion ID: 15099
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Texas’s “right” to allow employment decisions

Text: on the basis of political affiliation The County first observes that, through relevant provisions of the Texas Local Government Code, the Texas Legislature has manifested a clear intention that deputy sheriffs “serve[] at the pleasure of the sheriff.” TEX. LOC. GOV’T CODE ANN. § 85.003. It contends that “[w]hether to endorse a patronage system is a policy decision that should be left to the judgment of the people’s elected representatives.” The County therefore argues that our First Amendment jurisprudence should “defer” to Texas’s “right to decide . . . whether patronage practices will exist as part of local political systems.” This argument need not detain us long. For more than two decades, the Supreme Court has consistently held that “the First Amendment forbids government officials to discharge or threaten to discharge public employees solely for not being supporters of the political party in power, unless party affiliation is an appropriate requirement for the position involved.” Rutan v. Republican Party of Ill., 497 U.S. 62, 64 (1990); see also Branti v. Finkel, 445 U.S. 507 (1980); Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347 (1976). In essence, the County asks us to overrule the long line of Supreme Court authority placing limits on political patronage practices, along with the substantial body of case law in this circuit interpreting and applying that authority. See, e.g., Kinsey v. Salado Indep. Sch. 18 Dist., 950 F.2d 988 (5th Cir. 1992) (en banc); McBee v. Jim Hogg County, 730 F.2d 1009 (5th Cir. 1984) (en banc). This is something that we obviously lack the authority to do, even if we had the inclination. In a similar vein, the County argues that the Plaintiffs were well aware that they served at the pleasure of the sheriff and that their tenures ended automatically with the end of the sheriff’s term. It therefore contends that the Plaintiffs had no legitimate expectation of, or right to, being rehired by Molina. The County thus claims that Molina’s failure to rehire the Plaintiffs, even if based upon their political activities in support of Hillegeist, could not have violated their First Amendment rights. In Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U.S. 593 (1972), the Supreme Court observed that, “[f]or at least a quartercentury, this Court has made clear that even though a person has no ‘right’ to a valuable governmental benefit and even though the government may deny him the benefit for any number of reasons, there are some reasons upon which the government may not rely.” Id. at 597. “The denial of a public benefit may not be used by the government for the purpose of creating an incentive enabling it to achieve what it may not command directly.” Elrod, 427 U.S. at 361 (Brennan, J.). In Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398 (1963), the Court observed that “[i]t is too late in the day to doubt that the libert[y] of . . . expression may be infringed by the denial of or placing of conditions upon a benefit or 19 privilege.” Id. at 404. If it was too late in the day threeand-a-half decades ago to consider the County’s argument that the Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights could not have been violated by Molina’s failure to rehire them because they had no right or expectation of being rehired, it is certainly too late to consider it now. The County finally contends that it is unfair to subject it to a new round of lawsuits every four years when a new sheriff is elected merely because Texas law allows patronage dismissals by county sheriffs. The answer to this contention is that, if the Texas legislature wishes to minimize the potential liability of local governments for unconstitutional practices by local governmental officials, it can pass laws constraining the ability of such officials to engage in unconstitutional practices. As the County acknowledges, the legislature has done just that by giving counties the option of creating a civil service system for sheriff’s departments that at least limits to some degree the sheriff’s ability to engage in unconstitutional hiring practices. The fact that the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Department chose not to utilize this option provides no justification for allowing constitutional violations by the County’s sheriff to go unremedied.