Court Opinion

ID: 9478212
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:43:13.645674+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:18.209820
License: Public Domain

ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
In 1984, when Mr. Kehoe was deciding whether to run for office again, he had two relevant pieces of legal information before him. He knew that the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota, his own jurisdiction, had ruled, in a case involving the very state agency for which he worked, that his candidacy would not be unlawful. Johnson v. Cushing, 483 F.Supp. 608 (D.Minn.1980). He also knew that the Merit Systems Protection Board thought Johnson was wrong. This Court now upholds the Board’s determination that Mr. Kehoe’s violation of law was “willful.”
I respectfully dissent. I have no quarrel with the proposition that Johnson was in fact wrongly decided, and that the Board’s legal position — that the Hatch Act was violated in this case — is correct. The separate and more important question, however, is whether Mr. Kehoe’s conduct can be reasonably classified as willful. Until today, I had believed that federal courts were more reliable and authoritative interpreters of federal law than administrative agencies. Apparently this belief was incorrect. To my way of thinking, it was entirely reasonable for the employee involved here to rely upon a reported federal-court interpretation of the governing statute. Mr. Kehoe should not have to bear the consequences of the fact that this Court, years later, has determined that the decision on which he relied was not correctly decided.
Because the Court’s action today seems both unjust and an unwarranted degradation of the status of federal courts as expositors of federal law, I dissent.