Opinion ID: 4525690
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Unconstitutional Conditions

Text: The other potential framework through which to evaluate the plaintiffs-appellants’ challenge to the eligibility criteria is the unconstitutional-conditions doctrine. Rather than claiming a First Amendment right to sit on the Commission,5 the plaintiffs-appellants claim First Amendment rights to engage in the political activities that make them ineligible for the governmental benefit of membership on the Commission. In Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U.S. 593 (1972), the Supreme Court held that the government may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected interests—especially, his interest in freedom of speech. For if the government could deny a benefit to a person because of his constitutionally protected speech or associations, his exercise of those freedoms would in effect be penalized and inhibited. This would allow the government to “produce a result which (it) could not command directly.” Such interference with constitutional rights is impermissible. Id. at 597 (quoting Speiser v. Randall, 357 U.S. 513, 526 (1958)). In other words, “[w]hat the First Amendment precludes the government from commanding directly, it also precludes the government from accomplishing indirectly.” Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois, 497 U.S. 62, 77–78 (1990). 5 This distinguishes their case from Nevada Comm’n on Ethics v. Carrigan, 564 U.S. 117 (2011), in which legislators unsuccessfully claimed that conflict-of-interest rules preventing them from voting on legislation violated their alleged First Amendment right to cast such legislative votes. Carrigan’s genealogy of conflict-of-interest rules is instructive, as discussed below, but its rejection of the idea that the First Amendment protects one’s ability to cast a legislative vote is inapposite here. Daunt’s and MRP’s First Amendment claim deals with activities outside of the Commission, not whether they are entitled to sit on the Commission. See Daunt Br. at 28 (acknowledging that “there is no constitutional right to government employment”). Nos. 19-2377/2420 Daunt et al. v. Benson et al. Page 14 As discussed above, supra Part II.B.1, it is clear that at least some of the activities restricted by the eligibility criteria are protected by the First Amendment. In light of the government’s interest in avoiding partisan conflicts of interests and unsavory patronage practices, however, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that these types of restrictions do not run afoul of the First Amendment or the Equal Protection Clause. First, in United Public Workers of America (C.I.O.) v. Mitchell, 330 U.S. 75 (1947), the Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of the following sentence of the Hatch Act: “No officer or employee in the executive branch of the Federal Government . . . shall take any active part in political management or in political campaigns.” Id. at 82. The Court upheld the provision, explaining that Congress and the President are responsible for an efficient public service. If, in their judgment, efficiency may be best obtained by prohibiting active participation by classified employees in politics as party officers or workers, we see no constitutional objection. Id. at 99. Far from a wholesale ban on political expression, the provision “le[ft] untouched full participation by employees in political decisions at the ballot box and forb[ade] only the partisan activity of federal personnel deemed offensive to efficiency.” Id. The Court dismissed the suggestion that no harm could be done by federal employees engaging in these activities in their “free time” outside work hours. Id. at 95. “The influence of political activity by government employees, if evil in its effects on the service, the employees or people dealing with them, is hardly less so because that activity takes place after hours.” Id. The Supreme Court again addressed this provision of the Hatch Act in United States Civil Service Commission v. National Association of Letter Carriers, 413 U.S. 548 (1973), and reaffirmed Mitchell.6 In Letter Carriers, the Court was unequivocal in approving of Congress’s power to cleanse the civil service of partisan conflicts of interests, stating that if Congress 6 On the same day that it decided Letter Carriers, the Supreme Court upheld an Oklahoma statute that “restrict[ed] the political activities of the State’s classified civil servants in much the same manner that the Hatch Act proscribe[d] partisan political activities of federal employees.” Broadrick v. Oklahoma, 413 U.S. 601, 602 (1973). The relevant portions of the Broadrick decision, see id. at 616–18, mirror the Letter Carriers analysis, so we discuss only the latter. Nos. 19-2377/2420 Daunt et al. v. Benson et al. Page 15 forbade activities such as organizing a political party or club; actively participating in fund-raising activities for a partisan candidate or political party; becoming a partisan candidate for, or campaigning for, an elective public office; actively managing the campaign of a partisan candidate for public office; initiating or circulating a partisan nominating petition or soliciting votes for a partisan candidate for public office; or serving as a delegate, alternate or proxy to a political party convention[,] such actions would “unquestionably be valid.” Id. at 556. The Court explained that “the judgment of Congress, the Executive, and the country appears to have been that partisan political activities by federal employees must be limited if the Government is to operate effectively and fairly, elections are to play their proper part in representative government, and employees themselves are to be sufficiently free from improper influences.” Id. at 564. Finally, in Clements v. Fashing, 457 U.S. 957 (1982), the Supreme Court relied on Mitchell and Letter Carriers to uphold two sections of the Texas Constitution, the first of which prohibited certain officials from holding a seat in the state legislature prior to the expiration of their terms of office, and the second of which required an officeholder to resign before running for any other elected office. Whether under the Equal Protection Clause or the First Amendment, the Court held, “the burden on appellees’ First Amendment interests in candidacy are so insignificant that the classifications of § 19 and § 65 may be upheld consistent with traditional equal protection principles.” Id. at 971.7 The Court plurality’s application of rationalbasis review under the Equal Protection Clause “dispose[d] of” the challengers’ First Amendment claim. Id. Mitchell, Letter Carriers, and Clements squarely foreclose the present challenge to the Amendment’s eligibility criteria. Just as the Supreme Court in these cases permitted federal and state governments to restrict the “partisan political activity” of federal employees, Mitchell, 330 U.S. at 100, and state officeholders, Clements, 457 U.S. at 972, we discern no constitutional limitation on Michigan making the forbearance from such activity a condition of sitting on an 7 Even Justice Brennan’s dissenting opinion in Clements, which faulted the plurality for focusing its rational-basis review on whether the “class of candidates or voters that was burdened was somehow suspect” (for example, based on their wealth) instead of focusing on “the impact on the First Amendment rights of candidates and voters,” acknowledged that “some greater deference may be due the State because these restrictions affect only public employees.” 457 U.S. at 977–78 n.2 (Brennan, J., dissenting). Nos. 19-2377/2420 Daunt et al. v. Benson et al. Page 16 independent redistricting commission. MRP’s attempt to distinguish these cases is unpersuasive. It points out that the Amendment, unlike the regulations in the abovementioned cases, does not limit itself to “address[ing] undue influence, or its appearance, on current public employees and officials” due to its retroactive effect. MRP Br. at 15. But Michigan’s interest in addressing the appearance of undue influence—whether or not members of the Commission are “actively partisan,” Mitchell, 330 U.S. at 98—permits it to disqualify not only active partisans but also those whose recent partisan involvement, or whose association with active partisans, could create the appearance that the Commission is staffed by political insiders. See Letter Carriers, 413 U.S. at 565 (“[I]t is not only important that the Government and its employees in fact avoid practicing political justice, but it is also critical that they appear to the public to be avoiding it.”). Efforts to purge conflicts of interest from the democratic process “have been commonplace for over 200 years,” Nevada Comm’n on Ethics v. Carrigan, 564 U.S. 117, 122 (2011), and we are loath to disturb this longstanding practice, particularly when “public confidence in the integrity of the redistricting process” is at stake. MICH. CONST., art. IV, § 6(10); see Rucho v. Common Cause, 139 S. Ct. 2484, 2507 (2019) (noting states’ interests in “restricting partisan considerations in districting” and citing Michigan Commission Amendment as example). Beyond these Supreme Court cases, decisions of our sister circuits demonstrate that even when laws establish eligibility criteria for elected officeholders, thus burdening not only the candidates themselves but voters who may have otherwise sought to elect them, see Bullock v. Carter, 405 U.S. 134, 143 (1972), courts have applied a less-than-exacting standard of review. For instance, in evaluating a statute involving eligibility criteria for elected office, the Eleventh Circuit in Grizzle v. Kemp, 634 F.3d 1314 (11th Cir. 2011), declined to subject the statute to strict scrutiny. In Grizzle, the plaintiffs were disqualified from running for election to Georgia school boards because they had “immediate family member[s]” employed by their districts’ school systems. Id. at 1316. After discussing numerous cases applying rational-basis review to laws establishing eligibility criteria for public office, the Eleventh Circuit followed suit, explaining that “the State may regulate one step at a time in order to address what it deems the most pressing issues.” Id. at 1325. And in Fletcher v. Marino, 882 F.2d 605 (2d Cir. 1989), the Second Circuit applied rational-basis review to a law restricting certain political party officers from being elected to community school boards. Id. at 613; see id. at 612 (“[L]aws that Nos. 19-2377/2420 Daunt et al. v. Benson et al. Page 17 implicate, in a limited fashion, a person’s rights to participate in politics and to serve as an elected official have survived review under the First Amendment and have not been subjected to strict scrutiny.”). The laws at issue in these cases are highly similar to the eligibility criteria at issue here. In fact, the most salient difference—that the laws in these cases involved elected positions, whereas the Amendment does not—makes the argument for applying rational-basis review even stronger here, given that the eligibility criteria do not burden any voter’s access to the ballot. Under rational-basis review, for the reasons discussed supra Part II.B.1, the Amendment is constitutional. Furthermore, we note that the eligibility criteria do not represent some out-of-place addition to an unrelated state program; they are part and parcel of the definition of this Commission, of how it achieves independence from partisan meddling. This is critical to the constitutionality of a challenged program under the unconstitutional-conditions doctrine, as the Supreme Court’s government-funding cases make clear. The Court has explained that although the Spending Clause of the Federal Constitution “includes an ancillary power to ensure that those funds are properly applied to the prescribed use,” Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U.S. 173, 195 n.4 (1991), the government may not create as a funding condition “the affirmation of a belief that by its nature cannot be confined within the scope of the Government program.” Agency for Int’l Dev. v. All. for Open Soc’y Int’l, Inc., 570 U.S. 205, 221 (2013) (hereinafter “AOSI”). In AOSI, this meant that a Policy Requirement conditioning the grant of public-health funds on recipients “explicitly agree[ing] with the Government’s policy to oppose prostitution and sex trafficking” was unconstitutional. Id. at 213. The Supreme Court explained in AOSI that “the Policy Requirement goes beyond preventing recipients from using private funds in a way that would undermine the federal program. It requires them to pledge allegiance to the Government’s policy of eradicating prostitution.” Id. at 220. As in AOSI, here “[t]he line is hardly clear,” id. at 215, but in our view, the Amendment does not go beyond preventing would-be commissioners from engaging in activity that would undermine the independence of Michigan’s redistricting commission, nor does it require them to pledge allegiance to any governmental policy. Far from limiting the exercise of constitutional rights as extraneous conditions, the eligibility criteria themselves “define the limits” of the Commission. Id. at 214. Nos. 19-2377/2420 Daunt et al. v. Benson et al. Page 18 Also instructive in the unconstitutional-conditions context are the Supreme Court’s political patronage cases, which address the propriety of “the conditioning of public employment on political faith.” Elrod, 427 U.S. at 357; see Branti v. Finkel, 445 U.S. 507 (1980); Rutan, 497 U.S. 62. In Elrod, the Supreme Court held that the practice of patronage dismissals—firing public employees because they were not loyal to the incumbent party—violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments because these dismissals “severely restrict[ed] political belief and association.” 427 U.S. at 372. In Branti, the Court followed Elrod in holding that “the continued employment of an assistant public defender cannot properly be conditioned upon his allegiance to the political party in control of the county government.” 445 U.S. at 519. And in Rutan, the Court held that “the rule of Elrod and Branti extends to promotion, transfer, recall, and hiring decisions based on party affiliation and support.” 497 U.S. at 79. Throughout these cases, the Court considered whether, as an exception to this general rule against patronage practices, “the hiring authority can demonstrate that party affiliation is an appropriate requirement for the effective performance of the public office involved,” Branti, 445 U.S. at 518, namely for certain “high-level employees,” Rutan, 497 U.S. at 74, but never applied this exception. On the one hand, this line of cases is clearly distinguishable, given that it involved individuals who faced adverse employment actions because of their association with a particular political party. In this case, by contrast, Daunt and others like him are barred from the Commission because of their associations with professional politics, regardless of which party they or their family member supported. Being fired from one’s job because one is a Republican “unquestionably inhibits protected belief and association,” Elrod, 427 U.S. at 359, in a way that the Amendment unquestionably does not. At first blush these cases appear to point in the opposite direction of Mitchell, Letter Carriers, and Clements, which upheld restrictions on who could hold office. Upon closer examination, however, the patronage cases actually reaffirm the principles articulated in Mitchell, Letter Carriers, and Clements. Indeed, the Supreme Court explained in Elrod that “the activities that were restrained by the legislation involved in [Mitchell and Letter Carriers] are characteristic of patronage practices”—that is, the same patronage practices that the Court in Elrod so harshly criticized. 427 U.S. at 367. In other words, barring governmental employees from “taking an active part in political management or political Nos. 19-2377/2420 Daunt et al. v. Benson et al. Page 19 campaigns,” Letter Carriers, 413 U.S. at 554, served to “safeguard the core interests of individual belief and association” that patronage-based systems undermined. Elrod, 427 U.S. at 371. The Elrod/Branti/Rutan line of patronage cases thus supports the conclusion that the eligibility criteria do not impose an unconstitutional condition on the plaintiffs-appellants.