Cripes:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday made it harder for government employees to file lawsuits claiming they were retaliated against for going public with allegations of official misconduct.
By a 5-4 vote, justices said the nation's 20 million public employees do not have carte blanche free speech rights to disclose government's inner-workings. New Justice Samuel Alito cast the tie-breaking vote.
The case in question centered around a Los Angeles prosecutor, Richard Ceballos, who filed a lawsuit alleging he had been demoted and denied a promotion after writing “a memo questioning whether a county sheriff's deputy had lied in a search warrant affidavit.” The Supreme Court ruled against Ceballos, saying that the First Amendment does not protect “does not protect "every statement a public employee makes in the course of doing his or her job,” and instead sided with the L.A. District Attorney’s office.
"Public employees are still citizens while they are in the office," wrote Justice John Paul Stevens [in the dissent]. "The notion that there is a categorical difference between speaking as a citizen and speaking in the course of one's employment is quite wrong."
Precisely right. The Bush administration has been seeking to limit the scope of the whistleblower statutes, for reasons I bet we can all imagine quite easily, and it looks like stacking the court with hacks got them exactly what they were after.
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