Cite as: 513 U. S. 454 (1995)
Opinion of the Court
involve a post hoc analysis of one employee's speech and its impact on that employee's public responsibilities. Cf. Waters v. Churchill, 511 U. S. 661 (1994); Rankin v. McPherson, 483 U. S. 378 (1987); Connick v. Myers, 461 U. S. 138 (1983); Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U. S. 593 (1972). Rather, the Government asks us to apply Pickering to Congress' wholesale deterrent to a broad category of expression by a massive number of potential speakers.11 In Civil Service Comm'n v. Letter Carriers, 413 U. S. 548, 564 (1973), we established that the Government must be able to satisfy a balancing test of the Pickering form to maintain a statutory restriction on employee speech. Because the discussion in that case essentially restated in balancing terms our approval of the Hatch Act in Public Workers v. Mitchell, 330 U. S. 75 (1947), we did not determine how the components of the Pickering balance should be analyzed in the context of a sweeping statutory impediment to speech.12
11 The dissent seems to regard the honoraria ban as less onerous than our applications of Pickering to the speech of individual employees because the ban "is unrelated to the message or the viewpoint expressed by the government employee." Post, at 500. Our Pickering cases only permit the Government to take adverse action based on employee speech that has adverse effects on "the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees." 391 U. S., at 568. That certain messages may be more likely than others to have such adverse effects does not render Pickering's restriction on speech viewpoint based. Even a teacher's persistent advocacy in favor of the actions of the school board, cf. ibid., or an employee's exhortation against an attempt on the President's life, cf. Rankin v. McPherson, 483 U. S. 378 (1987), could provide proper grounds for adverse action if the government employer could demonstrate that such expression disrupted workplace efficiency. The honoraria ban as applied to respondents burdens speech far more than our past applications of Pickering because the ban deters an enormous quantity of speech before it is uttered, based only on speculation that the speech might threaten the Government's interests.
12 Two decades ago, a three-Justice plurality invoked Pickering in the course of upholding against vagueness and overbreadth challenges a provision of the Lloyd-La Follette Act, 5 U. S. C. § 7501(a) (1970 ed.), that allowed the discharge of certain federal employees "only for such cause as
467
Page: Index Previous 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007