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Freer SpeechThe lower courts give, as the Supreme Court taketh away.

By Jamin Raskin
Posted Friday, Aug. 10, 2007, at 1:18 PM ET

Liberals surely have reason to be despondent about the last Supreme Court term, especially the court's cavalier squelching of irreverent student expression ("Bong hits 4 Jesus") in public places. Our new First Amendment rule seems to be that in cases involving real speech by real people, the tie goes to the censor, but private corporations spending money to tell us whom to vote for enjoy the first-class speech rights that actual citizens, like high-school students, can only dream of now.

But even as the Supreme Court conducts broad U-turns on fundamental questions like free speech and racial equality in public schools, many lower courts—including some dominated by Republican appointees—have been acting with vigor to protect the rights of the people. Two appeals court decisions in the last several weeks reveal that, when citizens stand strong for their rights and smart lawyers mount a principled defense of the freedom of political expression, the rule of law can still pay off in big ways.

Consider first the D.C. Circuit's amazing (and, so far, totally ignored) June 19 decision in Sheet Metal Workers Local 15 v. National Labor Relations Board. The three-judge panel overturned a decision by the National Labor Relations Board that had barred the sheet-metal workers from staging any picketlike protest with a "mock funeral" theme at a Florida hospital that had been using nonunion contractors. Why would union sheet-metal workers want to stage a "mock funeral" protest? We'll get to that. The point is that here, in the United States of America, they were ordered not to do so by the government.

In a country with robust free speech protections for all, it might seem unremarkable for a court to defend the rights of peaceful and dramatic protest on a public sidewalk. But since the 1947 passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, courts have continually shut down protests like this whenever the picketers are union members and their political target is deemed to be "secondary" rather than primary. A "secondary" employer is one—like the hospital in this case—that does business with the union's main adversary (here, a heating and air-conditioning contractor).

In the topsy-turvy world of labor law, the courts have thus allowed the government to suppress speech by union members if they address it to what the government considers the wrong target. In any other context, we permit speakers to define their own message and pick their own targets. Conservatives can protest Disney for its gay-friendly policies and pro-choicers can boycott Domino's Pizza for its owner's right-wing politics. Paranoid homophobes can even protest the military funerals of war heroes to make their point that God is punishing America for tolerating gay people. But in the field of labor, political messages by picketers can be stifled simply because the government thinks they are better addressed to a different audience.

In the sheet metal workers case, union protesters passed out flyers at the hospital warning passers-by about Brandon Hospital's bad patient-care record and arguing that the same for-profit policies had caused it to use cut-rate, nonunion contractors. To illustrate their point, they conducted a mournful "mock funeral" led by the Grim Reaper, complete with plastic sickle and four pallbearers on the public sidewalk in front of the hospital. "They were accompanied," the D.C. Circuit panel noted (not without a sense of humor), "by various somber tunes from a portable audio system, including Siegfried's Funeral March by Wagner, O Fortuna from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, and the third movement from Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2."

The National Labor Relations Board issued an order commanding the union to cease and desist, claiming this was illegal "secondary" picketing since the union has no right of free speech except to criticize the specific nonunion contractors. According to the Bush-appointed labor board, the union had no broader right to criticize the hospital for doing business with them. This 60-year-old ban on "secondary boycotts" effectively destroys unions' ability to draw broader economic connections. The National Labor Relations Board won a preliminary injunction against the mock funeral from a federal district court, which was affirmed by the 11th Circuit in Atlanta.

But the D.C. Circuit rejected its sister circuit's reasoning and reversed the NLRB. The decision is a landmark First Amendment victory for labor. All three federal judges who threw out the anti-union injunction were Republican appointees, and the author of the opinion was Judge Douglas Ginsburg, once nominated to the high court by President Ronald Reagan. They all agreed the union's combination of "street theater and handbilling" was clearly protected by our First Amendment. For the first time in this context, a court invoked the abortion protest cases, Madsen v. Women's Health Center and Hill v. Colorado, finding that union protesters must have the same right to protest near hospitals as anti-abortion picketers enjoy. The opinion now exerts enormous pressure against the legislative double standard—in place since 1947—that said anyone, except for union members, can picket anyone else in America.

Then, last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California introduced the same First Amendment clarity to political cyberspace in another important decision, Porter v. Bowen. The case had much of its genesis in an article I wrote for Slate on Oct. 25, 2000, introducing the idea of Internet "vote-trading" to avert the catastrophe of a George W. Bush election a few weeks later. My suggestion was that Ralph Nader's supporters in swing states (like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida) should go online and communicate their intention to vote for Democratic nominee Al Gore in return for the agreement of Gore supporters trapped in hard-core red states (like Texas, Louisiana, Utah, and Alaska) to vote for Nader. This multipartisan interstate political coalition would allow Gore to hit 270 in the electoral college while not harming Nader's effort to reach 5 percent in the nationwide vote to qualify for federal financing. "If just 100,000 Gore supporters and 100,000 Nader supporters in the key states registered and kept their words," I wrote, "both a Gore victory and federal funding for the Greens could be accomplished."

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Jamin Raskin is a professor of constitutional law at American University's Washington College of Law and a Democratic state senator in Maryland serving on its judicial proceedings committee. He filed an amicus brief in Sheet Metal Workers v. National Labor Relations Board on behalf of Greenpeace USA. He was also originally of counsel to the plaintiffs in Porter v. Bowen. He is the author of Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court Versus the American People.
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It is interesting that a person with scholarly expertise on union law would fail to note that union activity in general was thought by jurists to violate antitrust laws and was proscribed to some degree until special legislation was passed in the 30's. In other words, unions in their basic activities have already been granted supra normal rights.

A resonable interpretation of Taft Hartley is that it represents a political pendulum swing against what was veiwed as abuse of those special rights.

Apart from the free speech issue raised, I had forgotten that Slate allowed its pages to be used by Jamin for partisan political organizing. As far as I'm concerned anyone should be free to so advocate, but I'm appalled that an enterprise with journalistic pretentions would so allow and continue to allow its pages to be used for political organizing.

--Breaker

(To reply, click here.)

When conservatives picket Disney World because of Disney's policies (or liberals picket Domino's because of it's owner's politics), they're not attacking a 'secondary target,' they're attacking precisely the people whose policies they disagree with. And, of course, the government did, in fact, ban protesters from military funerals (precisely to get rid of Fred Phelps and his noxious WBC turds). The whole 'hypocrisy' argument the author tries to set up is nothing more than a thin tissue of blatant LIES in support of unionized thugs attempting to intimidate people who don't even do business with them. Such behavior is disgusting, and rightly forbidden under the best (and fairest) labor law ever instituted in any society (Taft-Hartley).

--Planetary Eulogy

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