Civil Liberties

LEGAL ISSUES

Federal judiciary can’t stop support staff from political activity

By Rachel Weiner
August 18, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

In March 2018, while weighing candidates for governor in Maryland, Lisa Guffey wanted to attend an event featuring Democrat Ben Jealous.

She was told she could not. Her employer, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOUSC), had two days earlier imposed new rules barring all employees from expressing political views, attending political events or engaging in political activity.

This week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit deemed those restrictions unconstitutional.

“The government cannot condition public employment on the complete surrender of a citizen’s First Amendment rights,” wrote the majority of the three-judge panel in an opinion released Tuesday.



Lisa Guffey, 55, fought successfully for her right to engage in political activity outside of her administrative work in the U.S. federal court system. (Shala Graham)

Guffey, 55, of Silver Spring, Md., said in an interview that the rules immediately struck her as unconstitutional, but she complied with them until the courts agreed. ... “I can be both an active private citizen and a public servant and I’m glad the court recognized that,” she said. “There is no conflict between my work and what I did on my own time as a private citizen of this country, of the state of Maryland, of Montgomery County.”

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By Rachel Weiner
Rachel Weiner covers federal courts in Washington, D.C. and Richmond, Va. Twitter https://twitter.com/rachelweinerwp