Court Opinion

ID: 9468151
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:06:25.254685+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:43.220014
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I agree that Mount Healthy compels us to shift the burden of persuasion to the defendant once the plaintiffs have made a prima facie showing that political activity was a “motivating factor” in the discharges. As a matter of good policy, however, it is unclear to me why the analysis of Texas Department of Community Affairs v. Burdine, 450 U.S. 248, 101 S.Ct. 1089, 67 L.Ed.2d 207 (1981) should not be equally appropriate here. In Burdine, a Title VII case, the Court held that the ultimate burden of persuasion “remains at all time with the plaintiff,” although once the plaintiff has proved a prima facie case of discrimination, the defendant bears the intermediate burden of “producing evidence that the plaintiff was rejected, or someone else was preferred, for a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason.” Id. 450 U.S. at 254, 101 S.Ct. at 1094.
Although it is a leading decision involving the First Amendment rights of government employees, Mount Healthy did not address allegedly partisan political terminations in the framework of an election, where the reasonable prerogatives of the candidates returned by the voters must be weighed in the balance. In addition, successful candidates may be assigned the ultimate burden of proving the propriety of wholly meritorious firings. While the result in the case before us does not seem inappropriate, I am concerned that, in the context of allegedly partisan discharges of defeated campaigners, the broad sweep of the Mount Healthy analysis may create undesirable pitfalls for successful candidates.