➡ The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed with Judicial Watch, ruling that candidates can challenge election rules in federal court. This decision came from a case where Judicial Watch represented Mike Bost, an Illinois Congressman, and two presidential electors who were contesting Illinois’s law that allowed ballots to be counted up to two weeks after Election Day. The Supreme Court’s decision affirms that candidates have a broad right to challenge election rules, even if they don’t spend money on their campaigns. This ruling is seen as a significant victory for election integrity.
➡ The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a case challenging the counting of mail-in ballots up to two weeks after Election Day in Illinois. This decision is seen as a significant victory for election integrity, as it allows federal candidates to more easily challenge election results they believe have been compromised. The case was brought forward by Congressman Mike Bost and Judicial Watch, who argue that late ballot counting undermines voter confidence and invites fraud. The Supreme Court’s decision is expected to have a significant impact on future elections.
➡ Judicial Watch, a legal group, has been working to clean up voter registration rolls across the U.S., removing names that are no longer valid. They’ve successfully removed over 5 million names so far, including in states like California, Illinois, and Oregon. Recently, Oregon’s Secretary of State announced the removal of an additional 800,000 names, bringing the total to nearly 6 million. This action is aimed at reducing the potential for voter fraud and ensuring cleaner elections.
➡ Judicial Watch, a legal watchdog group, has asked the Supreme Court to review a case where a teacher was fired for expressing her political views on her private Facebook page during her summer vacation. The teacher, Jeannie Hedgepath, had made comments about the riots following George Floyd’s death, which led to her dismissal after complaints from the public. Judicial Watch argues that this case threatens the free speech rights of public employees, as it could lead to punishment for lawful off-duty speech if it provokes complaints. They believe that the First Amendment should protect public employees from being fired for expressing their views outside of work.

Hey, everyone. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton here with our weekly update on social media. Thanks for joining us. One of the most important weekly updates you’ll hear from me. It’s the announcement. I’m honored to announce that the Supreme Court of the United States agreed with Judicial Watch. We won 7, 2 before the high court on a very important election integrity issue, the question of whether candidates have the right to challenge election rules in federal court have standing to challenge. In this case. We represent Mike Bost, Congressman from Illinois. Two presidential electors who technically were federal candidates as well, who are challenging Illinois’s law that allowed the counting of ballots that arrive for up to two weeks after election Day.

That means ballots could be as late as 14 days after election Day and still get counted. Now, federal law sets on election Day, not on election Week, not on election Month. But the court didn’t want to get at the merits. They said a candidate didn’t have standing to challenge this. And they said, well, he was going to win anyway. We’re like, well, that’s ridiculous because he has a right to an accurate count. He has an inherent right to challenge unlawful election rules and making him, for instance, spend money and time and effort and concern and anxiety related to the counting of ballots that occur after election day.

And the Supreme Court agreed with us completely and came up and concluded, really affirmed what has been the law prior frankly to 2020, that candidates have a broad standing right in federal court. Again, it was 7, 2. It was 5 votes in favor of the broadest possible standing, 2 votes in favor of a narrow standing, but pretty broad standing. And then the two left wing justices, Justice Jackson and Justice Sotomayor, filed a dissent. Now, the big majority opinion, the 5. So what happened is Justice Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion. He was joined by Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh.

Concurring in the opinion was Obama appointee Elena Kagan and Justice Barrett. And they agreed that candidates did have the standing to challenge such a rule, but they said they only needed to allege pocketbook injuries, meaning spending money would be enough or should be the hurdle they have to meet. And Chief Justice Roberts in his opinion, rejected that in his broad analysis. And this is the way. Justice Chief Justice Roberts, I think I got a copy of the way. This is what it looks like when it’s published officially. I guess it’s white. So really only could hold it up against the blue, make it more blue.

Can you see it now? Well, I guess you really, it doesn’t matter. So the. And I encourage you to read the decision in its entirety. It’s available below. We’ll provide a link to start. Candidates. Chief Justice Roberts writes for the five judge majority. Candidates also have an interest in a fair process. Candidates are not common competitors in the economic marketplace. They seek to represent the people, and their interest in that prize cannot be severed from their interest in the electoral process. A process quote of the most fundamental significance under our constitutional structure, win or lose, candidates suffer when the process departs from the law.

Thus, the long shot and shoe and alike would suffer harm if a candidate chose to conduct its election by, say, flipping a coin. The result of such an election would not reflect the will of the people, and the candidates would lose the opportunity to compete for the people’s support. So, too, similar harms would result from less dramatic departures. For example, if a state decided to discard a random 10% of each vote. Whether these decisions help, hurt, or have no effect on the candidate, on a candidate’s electoral prospects, they deprive the candidate of a fair process and an accurate result.

So if there’s gaming potentially of the way ballots are counted, as our lawsuit alleges for Congressman Bost, the Supreme Court said, yes, you can sue. And contrary to what Justice Barrett and Justice Kagan suggested, you don’t need to spend money in order to sue. Because what Chief Justice Roberts wanted to do and his colleagues, he wanted to be sure that the less courts are figuring out what happened after an election, the better. By suggesting they got to spend money, it means they got to go through the process before maybe a prima facie violation of the law is challenged.

I mean, in this case, our client was told he couldn’t challenge the law because he won by too many votes. You know, that’s absurd. And further in the lawsuit, further in the opinion, I should say, candidates have a concrete and particularized interest in the rules that govern the counting of votes in their elections. Regardless whether these rules harm their electoral prospects or increase the cost of their campaigns. Their interest extends to the integrity of elections and the democratic process by which they earn or lose the support of the people they seek to represent. That’s a pretty powerful statement.

Candidates interests extend to the integrity of the election. Now, great victory for our team. And that’s worth all of the election work Judicial Watch has done to get a result like that. What a tremendous and powerful vindication of all the concerns Judicial Watch and others have had about what we believe to be shenanigans in the way elections have been run. And isn’t this decision about 2020 in many respects. Because in 2020, you may remember when candidates sought to challenge election rules, they were told, it’s too soon, it’s too soon, no harm. Or if it was close to the election, it’s too close to the election, or if it’s after the election, it’s too late.

Here there’s no real question that candidates, assuming there’s a valid claim, meaning they make a credible case that is a federal or constitutional issue, federal statute at issue, or a constitutional violation, they can go into court. And there’s no question about the standing. I mean, the idea that someone like President Trump might have the standing, might not have had the standing because he was challenging something too soon, or the challenge may have been incidental to or immaterial to the outcome of the race. That’s done. And unfortunately, the court didn’t deal with it in 2020, but they’re dealing it, dealing with it right now.

So it’s a significant victory. And I can’t give enough credit to our legal team for getting us here. I can’t give enough credit to you, dear supporter, those of you who supported our work not only prayerfully, but with actual financial contributions to getting this awesome result. And it is an awesome result. This is the statement I issued on behalf of Judicial Watch. This is the most important Supreme Court election law ruling in a generation. Too many courts have denied candidates the standing, the challenge, unlawful election rules, such as the outrageous ballots that arrive and are counted after Election Day.

American citizens concerned about election integrity should celebrate this Supreme Court victory. I thank Judicial Watch’s legion of supporters and our election law team that helped achieve this historic result. And, of course, Bob Popper leads our election integrity team here. Russ Nobel, also a veteran election lawyer, specifically shepherded this case. And our longtime team member and attorney, Eric Lee has also been working diligently on these issues as well. And we were aided before the court by Paul Clement, a veteran Supreme Court litigator, and Christine Vincent, who’s been helping us in Illinois, managing a case there as our local counsel.

But I just can’t tell you how excited I am. And I guess it really is a remarkable vindication of those of us who were concerned about the way the courts operated in 2020, because essentially, Chief Justice Roberts says we mishandled that, that the courts did not give credence to the rights candidates have to try to settle controversies about the integrity of the election. Now in some ways, he says, well, this is all about ballot counting. Only about ballot counting. Well, you know, that’s a lot you know, pretty much everything elections are disputed over relate to ballot counting.

So that gainsmanship, where they changed the rules at the last minute and told people they couldn’t challenge them until after the election or until after we knew what the impact is, that’s not the standard anymore. Now, interestingly, as I noted, two justices agreed with the result. The candidates had standing to challenge this, what we alleged to be illicit counting of late ballots. But Justice Barrett and Justice Kagan said they need to allege a pocketbook injury. And the response that Chief Justice Roberts had, well, that doesn’ tit just raises the issue of when judges are going to be able to handle this.

Because if there’s a legal issue, a candidate shouldn’t have to spend money in order to vindicate his right here to have a process that’s legal from the get go. And as he highlighted, some people don’t necessarily spend money in campaigns. You get insurgent candidates that are just operating on shoestring budgets practically. And so that doesn’t really solve the issue in terms of providing standing to candidates to vindicate our system. Now, the leftist justices, more left, Justice Kagan’s pretty left, but not reliably so in certain issues. They issued what I consider to be a partisan dissent, you know, saying, well, this is just a brand new standing standard.

It isn’t. And it’s going to unleash a deluge of cases. It won’t. First of all, it costs money to engage in litigation. So if it’s a stupid reason campaigns don’t have the money to engage in stupid litigation, it’s got to be litigation that’s credible and it’s going to have an impact on the campaign in a way to justify the use of precious campaign resources to engage in litigation. And the litigation is incredible. Courts deal with incredible litigation all the time, and it can be handled appropriately. So that was, to me, not a terribly persuasive. Because sometimes dissents raise things that are credible, right.

And you’ve got to pay attention to them. You know, Justice Jackson, we may not like her, but sometimes she raises, you know, she writes a dissent here and there that makes you think, you know, she has a fair point. So it’s important that you read the full decision. And I’ll give, you know, to be fair to the other justices, give them their full credit, their full, give them your full attention as well, and see if it’s persuasive to you. But in terms of the law, in terms of the way the law is now applied, our candidate client, Congressman Bost, is now going to be able to challenge this rule in Illinois.

What next? Well, we’re in the Supreme Court already on the underlying merits of the issue, whether states can contrary, we allege to federal law, count ballots that arrive after election Day. In Illinois, they count ballots for up to two weeks after election Day, sometimes even without a postmark. We have a challenge there. In California, we had a challenge for Congressman Issa. They count ballots that arrive for up to two weeks after election day. I talked about this last week. I Talked about how 2026 is going to be a big week or a big year for election law because of Judicial Watch.

Well, I told you Supreme Court just ruled. And now the Mississippi case is before the Supreme Court. By Mississippi, it’s called, I think that it’s called Watson is the shorthand way of calling it. So the Watson case out of Mississippi, we challenged Mississippi’s counting of ballots that arrive for up to five days after election day. And the lower court on the merit said, no, you can’t do that. And the fifth Circuit said, no, counting ballots that arrive after election day is unlawful. And so the Supreme Court is going to figure that out one way or the other.

We suspect they wouldn’t have taken it up, I think, if they didn’t want to decide the question this term. So right now we’re in the middle of the briefing on the issue. We expect the oral argument. I thought it might be in March. It looks like it might be in April now with a decision by the end of the term, usually by June 30th. So huge developments. And when you look at the majority opinion, it seems to augur well for how theyhow the court majority will rule as to whether you can count ballots that arrive after election day, which in my view is in plain violation of federal law, which sets an election day.

It invites fraud and undermines voter confidence. And I tell you, if the court knocks that out, our elections will by an exponential way all of a sudden be more honest because they won’t be having ballots come over the transom through the mail after election day to change outcomes. I noted last week it’s worth noting again, there are two members of the House of Representatives who are in office as a result of ballots they came in and were counted as after election day. And they’re Democrats. They beat House Republican, two House Republicans. As far as I’m concerned, the House Republicans would be within their rights to seat the Republicans whose seats were taken from them as a result of this illicit counting.

They don’t need a Supreme Court decision to judge the election, the House can do it under the Constitution directly. So these, this late ballot counting matters is my point. And so to enforce the rule of law, restore voter confidence and guard against fraud, they’ve got to set the rule in place or reaffirm the rule. I mean, when you look at all the amicus briefs that were filed, I think there were like 16 or 17. All these leftists are apoplectic about this little scheme being thrown out by the Supreme Court about post election day counting of ballots that arrive late.

So they should be nervous because they know what they’re. Because I think they know that we got their number and I think they’re worried the Supreme Court certainly after reading this decision, may have their number as well. So great work by Judicial Watch and Russ Nobile, who had been shepherding this case up until the Supreme Court. He made a comment about it just the other day. Hey everyone, Russell Nobile, I’m one of the election integrity attorneys here at Judicial Watch. A big day for us here at Judicial Watch where the Supreme Court agreed with us and reversed the federal courts in Illinois to decisions throwing out our election integrity lawsuit there challenging Illinois’s practice of allowing ballots to come in 14 days after election.

We’re representing Congressman Mike Boss there along with two federal electors. The court in the 7:2 decision basically adopted everything we said and said the courts are wrong to throw out an election. Excuse me, throw out our lawsuit. We, the court talked about the different, different issues as to why federal candidates have standing. And the court ultimately decided it doesn’t matter so much whether the candidate’s going to win or lose the election. Candidates have an interest in making sure the vote count is accurate. And even if he wins by a large margin because it cost him more money and causes him problems in making sure the election is run with integrity.

And so this is part of a multi year strategy to get federal court courts to finally answer why these ballots are coming in days and weeks after election. We have another case suspending before the Supreme Court right now. That’s a case out of Mississippi that we won in the fifth Circuit. That case is part of the will finally presumably answer once and for all why these ballots can come in days and weeks after election. We think this is a really important issue to stop this really, this really sort of banana republic practice allowing ballots to come in days and weeks after election.

Thank you for all of your support. And we’ll have more information to come on the cases. And then here, you know, Congressman Boss, I have to thank him I mean, it’s not easy to get a client, and certainly a sitting member of Congress to take on a fight like this. So Congressman Boss deserves some kudos for standing in the gap with Judicial Watch, as our legal team represented him. He said, I’m thankful the US Supreme Court has ruled strongly in our favor and concluded we have standing to challenge Illinois’s unconstitutional law allowing vote by mail ballots to be counted two weeks after Election Day.

This is a critically important step forward in the fight for election integrity and fair elections. I look forward to continuing to pursue this case as we navigate the next stages of the legal process. It’s vitally important that we restore the people’s trust in our elections. Amen. Amen. So, Thanks to Judicial Watch, it now is going to be easier for federal candidates to stop an election from being stolen. Okay? That’s the point of this case. So if they decide to count ballots that shouldn’t be counted contrary to law, a candidate can get into court a lot more easily and stay in court to litigate and vindicate the rule of law and his rights as a candidate.

Something that in my view was denied improperly to Trump and others in 2020. And that game is no more. That game, you know, the game rules have changed. They changed the rules to keep Trump out and the Supreme Court fixed the rules to allow similar challenges in the future that have merit. You’re afraid that someone might actually make the merit case that an election has been compromised and in order to avoid that, you say you can’t even be in court to make the case. Well, the court didn’t find that to be appropriate. The Supreme Court did, and hence this decision.

So great news out of the Supreme Court of the United States. Big news. One of the most important Judicial Watch victories since we’ve been around 30 plus years. And on another election related note, Judicial Watch, as I’ve noted, has been the lead in cleaning up election rolls. We to date have had our lawsuits and legal actions caused the removal of 5 million dirty names from the election rolls. The these are people who’ve died or move away who otherwise shouldn’t be on the rolls. The states weren’t cleaning the rolls as the federal law requires. We either sued them or warned them.

And in response, they removed upwards of 5 million names in places like Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, D.C. pennsylvania, North Carolina, Colorado, Kentucky, etc. So that 5 million number I’ve been talking about a lot, but we didn’t stop at 5 million because we knew millions more names needed to be removed, including in California, in Illinois, and in Oregon. And in Oregon, their roles were a mess. We, in our lawsuit that we filed against Oregon, this is what our complaint alleged. Judicial Watch argued that Oregon’s voter rolls containers large numbers of inactive registrations, meaning names that are way too old to be legitimately on the list.

And that 29 of Oregon’s 36 counties removed few or no registrations as required by federal election law. Judicial Watch asserts that Oregon and 35 of its counties had overall registration rates and exceeding 100% and that Oregon had the highest known inactive registration rate of any state in the nation. So, inactive registration rate is the percentage of dirty names on the list. And when you have a registration rate exceeding 100% in 35, I think of 36 counties, and statewide, that means you’ve got more people on the voting rolls than are living there and are eligible to vote.

So we filed this litigation in 2024, and, you know, it’s been proceeding. They tried to knock it out, but the court authorized that it be able to proceed in order to clean up the rolls. And then it turns out a new Secretary of state, after our lawsuit is filed, just announced that he’s removing 800,000 names from the rolls. Just announced he’s removing 800,000 names from the rolls. And just like that, our success numbers went from 5 million to nearly 6 million. 5.8 million specifically. So imagine seeing the news if your Judicial Watch is saying, wait, they just admitted that we’re all right here, that everything we’ve been saying about Oregon is correct, when you have the Secretary of State, a Democrat, by the way, admit they haven’t cleaned up the rolls.

And this is what. And so this is the video that I had posted that was. Got a lot of attention. Nearly 2 million views. Hey, everyone. Huge news. Judicial Watch lawsuits led to the cleanup of 4 million dirty names from the voting rolls in just the last two years or so. But there’s more heavy lifting to be done for cleaner elections. That’s why Judicial Watch just sued the state of Oregon to force it to finally clean up its voting rolls, which are a mess. Federal law requires states to take reasonable steps to clean up their voting rolls, and Oregon hasn’t been doing that.

In fact, our new lawsuit just filed for and with the Constitution Party of Oregon and Oregon voters details how 29 of Oregon’s 36 counties removed few or no registrations as required by federal election law. Oregon and 35 of its counties had overall registration rates exceeding 100%. Frankly, Oregon has the highest known inactive registration rate of Any state in the nation. You know, dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections. Oregon, as I said, has some of the worst voting rolls in America and needs to clean them up as soon as possible. In the meantime, Judicial Watch has lawsuits to clean up voting rolls in California and in Illinois.

Simply put, millions of ineligible names need to be removed from the voter rolls under federal law. And Judicial Watch has been, is, and will be in federal court making it happen. There’s no doubt that our lawsuit had an impact. You’re not a Secretary of State who just out of the blue just decides to clean up the rolls. And look at these startling admissions that he made to a news entity in Oregon. Yes, so this is the story that I initially was reacting to. The cleanup comes as Oregon’s first in the nation vote by mail system is under intense scrutiny.

Well, we sued. Right now, we sued. Justice Department is asking for voter records from Oregon, but we’re suing most directly to get the records from. Let me start over on that. So this is what the story leads with. As Oregon kicks off a general election year, Secretary of State Tobias Reed is taking what he says is the overdue step of cleaning up voter rolls. That process could lead to the cancellation of as many as 800,000 registrations. Reid says that’s the number currently classified as inactive on voter rolls. To be clear, inactive voters do not receive ballots, but their names remain on the rolls.

Now, not receiving ballots is just a distraction to make you think that their name being on the rolls. No risk of their voting or their names being used to vote illegally. Because if you’re on the rolls, you can vote. No one asks you for additional information when you go to vote. So that’s a pool of names fraudsters can draw from. So 800,000 fewer names on the rolls that shouldn’t be there mean that that’s 800,000 fewer opportunities for voter fraud. That’s why the rules are in place. Dirty names can mean dirty elections. And thanks to Judicial Watch, the elections are going to be a lot cleaner in Oregon, according to Reid.

Let’s go back here. Oregon currently has 3,063,747 registered active voters. Almost 800,000 more voter registration status. Excuse me, about 800,000 more voters. Registration status is inactive because their mail, including ballots or official notices from county offices have been returned undelivered. According to Reid, he hasn’t his colleagues or predecessors. They haven’t cleaned the rolls since 2017, it seems. So think about that. They’ve got 3 million active voters, 800,000 inactive voters for a total of 3.8 million names on the voting list. So they have a 3.8 million name voting list, 20% of which is dirty. According to the article, 160, 3000 names are going to be removed immediately.

With the remainder, they got to figure out how to get through them all and get it removed. So our litigation without a doubt caused this. It’s a credit again to Judicial Watch’s election law team. Bob Popper, Eric Lee, Russ Nobile, our team in Oregon. And it shows you that, you know, the heavy lifting gets results. 800. That’s, you know, first of all, what an outrage that that number is as high as it is. That’s why we sued. And it shows you there are millions of dirty names on the rolls nationally, as I said last week. And as observed previously, it’s about 24 million.

So we’ve removed 5 million. We’re about to get to 5.8 million. There’s probably another 2 million or so between Illinois and California, where we have lawsuits as well. But there’s millions more beyond them. And Judicial Watch is the key national group. The leading group, Justice Department, isn’t suing to remove names directly right now, for whatever reason, they haven’t even joined these lawsuits. They’re suing to get information about names they may want to remove in the future. But right now we know they’re dirty names and we’re suing to get them removed now. So this is again, a remarkable success by Judicial Watch.

We go to federal court, Oregon says, oh, no, we don’t want to be sued by Judicial Watch. Throw this case out. The case doesn’t get thrown out and they remove the names. So I presume the case is going to end soon, but we’ll see, because we want an enforcement mechanism. We want something we can point to to make sure the names are ultimately removed per the promise of the Secretary of State. But it shows you you can have success upholding the rule of law, even in blue states. I mean, to his credit, this new Democrat Secretary of State comes on, he sees this lawsuit, he looks at the numbers, he says, well, this is indefensible.

Now I’m sure he’ll say, oh, Judicial Watch had nothing to do with it. Come on. I mean, in New York City, they removed a million names. As I said, In LA County, 1.2 million names. These are Democrats who are removing the names. So you just can’t give up on entire swaths of the country in terms of election integrity, because every citizen in Oregon deserves to have an honest election as Much as the law allows. Now, does it mean the voting rolls are going to be pristine? No, and that’s not the standard. The standard is take reasonable steps to clean up the rolls.

In this case, they were sending out the cards the law requires. They weren’t getting any contact back, and they still left the names on the rolls for years. So, again, thank you to Judicial Watch’s legal team, thank you to our supporters for allowing this great work to get done and achieving these significant results on behalf of the rule of law. And again, 5.8 million less opportunities for voter fraud thanks to your heavy lifting, Judicial Watch. So we were asking the Supreme Court to take up yet another Judicial Watch case, this one, an important First Amendment case, on behalf of a teacher who was fired for some reason, really innocent, straightforward Facebook posts she made over the summer about matters of public concern.

So she was off duty, on vacation, literally sitting at the beach, posting some Facebook memes and a few comments. She gets back, she gets fired because some leftists and agitators in the school district didn’t like what she said or even outside the school district. We didn’t even know where everyone came from. And that was upheld by the lower court and the seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. And we’re asking the Supreme Court to take up the case and vindicate our client’s rights. As we say in our lawsuit release, or excuse me, in our press release, Judicial Watch announced it filed a petition for writ assertiari.

This is the thing. This is the writ assertiori the petition. It’s a nice big fund. Now it’s colored white. Now, the interesting thing about the Supreme Court, or an interesting thing, is you have to have the filings like this, you know, in a booklet form. And each booklet has a different color depending on what type of brief it is. So we’re asking the Supreme Court to review a decision of the Seventh Circuit, the U.S. court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, that permits public school officials to fire a tenured teacher for political speech made privately off duty and far removed from the classroom.

So our client, Jeannie Hedgepath, who was a longtime social studies teacher at Palatine High School in Illinois, was fired after posting commentary on her private Facebook page during her summer vacation in 2020. Addressing the riots and civil unrest following the death of George Floyd, School administrators cited concerns about disruption after receiving complaints largely from members of the public with no direct connection to the school. Hedgepeth praised Tom Sowell, who is one of my favorites, and other black conservative leaders in one of the posts that got her fired. So she’s praising Tom Sowell, I think, Larry Elder and Candace Owens and making straightforward comments about the rioters and the outrageous activities of that and they fire her.

So it isn’t like she was at school making political statements that were causing disruption. She was just making straightforward political comments on a private Facebook group. So we filed this lawsuit back in 2021 and we asked for damages from the school district and the district board members and the officials who participated directly in her firing. So we challenged the 7th Circuit’s decision which held that the school district’s interest in avoiding disruption, specifically emails and phone calls from members of the public, most of whom had no direct connection to the school, expressing concern or outrage about Hedgepath’s summer vacation post outweighs her right to speak.

So some people, you know, what is called the heckler’s veto, the peanut gallery saying, we don’t like what she said. It’s no reason for her to lose her job. Under long standing Supreme Court precedent, beginning with Pickering versus Board of Education, courts must balance the public employee’s right to speak on matters of public concern and against the government employer’s interest in maintaining the effective operation of a workplace. So as I said, if she were in class making politicized comments and controversial comments or even non controversial comments that were just causing disruption and all sorts of things happening in school, that’s one issue.

Maybe they have a case. But the idea that anything someone says that might cause an email to a school district and you’re a teacher and you’re just talking privately on the outside or on Facebook or a tweet or whatever will get you fired, that means you have zero First Amendment rights under the law. Under the so called Pickering test that balances the employer’s right as a government entity to have basically a non disrupted workplace with someone’s First Amendment rights. Judicial Watch argues that test does not permit public employers to punish employees based on disagreement with their political views.

The viewpoint discrimination in this case is unmistakable. The district fired Hedgepeth because members of the community objected to the political views she expressed in core First Amendment speech on her private Facebook page or while on summer vacation. Rather than condemn that blatant censorship, the court below sanctioned it, holding the vague and unsupported claims that the disruption empower public school officials to silence disfavored viewpoints. The petition further warns the 7 Circuit’s decision pose a serious threat to free speech nationwide. If allowed to stand, the decision threatens to chill the political speech of millions of public employees nationwide.

It teaches that lawful off Duty speech on matters of public concern may be punished whenever enough people complain. That rule cannot be squared with Pickering, with this court’s precedence or with the First Amendment itself. And we argued that the seventh Circuit misapplied the law by applying, transferring, transforming a narrow balancing test into a broad license for censorship, allowing government employers to discipline employees not for workplace misconduct, but for expressing controversial political appointees that provoke some opposition. In fact, the 7th Circuit, showing frankly to me outrageous judicial bias, criticized her speech and her opinion. They essentially said, we don’t like what she said either.

Well, thank you. Now we know why you wouldn’t rule in her favor. So it really was, as far as I’m concerned, a judicial message and an indication of abuse. This case goes to the heart of whether the First Amendment still protects 22 million public employees from being fired for daring to exercise their God given first Amendment right to express views outside the workplace. No teacher should lose her career because outsiders object to political views she expressed privately and lawfully. Do you agree with that? Now it may surprise you to know there are 22 million public employees, But that’s the reality.

And they shouldn’t lose their first Amendment rights just because they work for the government. The government would like nothing more. To have us all work for him, all work for it and therefore lose your first Amendment rights to criticize the government, to criticize anything. And that’s not, of course, that’s not the law. And here she made the mistake of criticizing the conduct of leftists during the George Floyd craziness and the school panicked, the seventh Circuit got nervous and they threw the first Amendment out the window. That’s how I read this. That’s my non lawyer way of explaining what’s going on here.

This is why we have a Supreme Court to step in and say hold on, let’s figure this out. So this Pickering test has been abused by courts throughout the country. Some courts are very, you know, they take Judicial Watch’s view. Look, they’re not on the job. They get to talk about stuff in the public domain. Relax. Others take the 7 circuits views saying that they can go back potentially as far as forever to find out what you said online and then fire you. With no real showing of quote, disruption. So whether this case will be taken up by the Supreme Court, I don’t know.

It should be. But this is another example of Judicial Watch doing the heavy lifting again for the first Amendment. You may recall we represented a teacher who was fired for making similar posts up in Massachuscuse me up in, yeah, it was up in Massachusetts. McCray, the Supreme Court didn’t want to take up the case. I think they’re going to have to take up this case respectfully. We represented a coach who was fired, got that case settled. This is a significant issue, You know, and the left is out there talking about those people who were fired for making what many people believe to be inappropriate comments about Charlie Kirk.

And they’re making the same argument in reverse. Right? So you can’t have it both ways. Leftists, you can’t say that someone can criticize Charlie Kirk or, you know, suggest he deserved what he got or whatever outrageous thing they say and still be protected from being fired while allowing the firing of this poor teacher for daring to criticize people burning a city. But this is the way the left is right. You can say whatever you want and you’re protected. But if you’re conservative, the First Amendment doesn’t apply to you. So I hope the Supreme Court takes up this case.

So it’s been a big week here at Judicial Watch. Major successes. Supreme Court victory. Major victory for cleaning up election rolls. 800,000 names were about to be removed in one state because of our federal lawsuit. Major Supreme Court petition to protect the first Amendment of millions of Americans. The first Amendment rights of millions of Americans. The free speech rights, the God given free speech rights that are protected by our Constitution. If there’s anyone doing more work for the rule of law on elections than Judicial Watch, I want to, I want to meet them. There isn’t. So if you’re not supporting Judicial Watch, I encourage you to do so.

Go to judicialwatch.org, judicialwatchoneword.org and give us your most generous contribution because there’s still more heavy lifting to be done to clean our elections, protect our Constitution, stand against the lawfare, reverse the Biden immigration invasion, you name it. I’ll see you here next time on the Judicial Watch weekly update. Thanks for watching. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button and like our video down below.
[tr:tra].

See more of Judicial Watch on their Public Channel and the MPN Judicial Watch channel.