‘Punish everyday Americans’: Governor strips government workers of First Amendment rights

The governor of Pennsylvania has issued an executive stripping state employees of their First Amendment rights and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression says it is looking forward to fighting him in court.

The FIRE explains that Josh Shapiro’s “sweeping executive order” insists that public employees, even when not on duty, now are gagged from expressing any opinion that someone, somewhere, somehow, could define as “scandalous” or “disgraceful.”

The Fire called that “an impossibly vague restriction effectively prohibiting wide swaths of speech protected by the First Amendment.”

“Free speech is the keystone of our democracy, and today it’s threatened in the Keystone State by Gov. Shapiro,” explained Aaron Terr, the foundation’s chief of public advocacy. “No elected official can slap a gag order like this on state workers. This is an abuse of power, and we’re looking forward to challenging this flagrant government overstep in court.”

The organization noted that the gag order is for “teachers to toll booth operators, librarians to linemen” and is “flatly unconstitutional.”

The foundation sent a letter a few weeks ago expressing concern about the flagrant outrage, but Shapiro’s office refused to respond.

Now the organization is going public.

“The state is strategically putting all the chess pieces in place to punish everyday Americans for nothing more than saying something the government doesn’t like,” charged Terr. “Our job is to smack those pieces off the board before someone gets fired for speaking their mind.”

The FIRE explained, “Broad and subjective terms like ‘scandalous’ and ‘disgraceful’ reach a vast array of speech protected by the First Amendment. FIRE explained in its Aug. 5 letter that although the state exercises significant authority over its employees’ speech when they speak as part of their job duties, government employees still have robust First Amendment rights to speak as citizens on important issues.”

And, in fact, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose decisions are binding on the state, earlier blocked a state agency enforcement of an agency’s ban on workers wearing political masks.

Concern that that would be a problem was “merely conjectural,” it said.

“This isn’t a close call. Pennsylvania’s expansive restriction on state employees is unconstitutional. If the executive order is not promptly amended, FIRE looks forward to challenging it in court to defend public workers’ crucial First Amendment rights,” the foundation warned.

The problem is because months ago Shapiro “quietly inserted” the vague censorship language into his administration’s code of conduct.

“The revision ensnares not only conduct, but speech — a departure from a preexisting management directive that used the same language but didn’t clearly include expression,” the report said.

His administration then followed with a warning about “antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate speech.”