Dunleavy/Babcock face financial jeopardy on illegal loyalty oath demand

The foolish and illegal loyalty oath has come back to haunt Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Tuckerman Babcock. The executive overreach could cost them plenty.

A federal judge found Friday that Dunleavy and his former chief of staff violated the constitutional rights of two doctors at the Alaska Psychiatric Institute who refused to follow directions to pledge allegiance to the so-called Dunleavy agenda in 2018. Babcock fired them and they filed a lawsuit in 2019.

The decision by Senior U.S. District Judge John Sedwick Friday is a major defeat for Dunleavy and Babcock, who could be personally liable for their actions. The judge refused to go along with the claim of “qualified immunity” because Dunleavy and Babcock should have known they were violating the rights of employees.

They violated First Amendment rights and free speech rights by seeking a statement of political loyalty, Sedwick found. In previous administrations, about 250 at-will employees had been asked to submit resignation letters. Dunleavy and Babcock upped that number to more than 800, including many jobs where employees did not set policy.

A separate lawsuit, filed by fired state attorney Libby Bakalar, deals with the same issues, but is some months behind this one on the court schedule.

On Friday night, she said in a Tweet: “Since the day I was fired, all I ever wanted was for a judge to say @GovDunleavy’s & Babcock’s resignation demand scheme was unconstitutional. That happened today. Even if it doesn’t happen again in my companion case, the result is the same & future employees are safe from this.”

Dunleavy and Babcock are in legal trouble now in large part because they told reporters of the Anchorage Daily News in 2018 what they intended to do and why.

These unintended moments of candor weighed heavily in the court ruling.

“If you don’t want to express a positive desire, just don’t submit your letter of resignation,” Babcock told the newspaper about the loyalty oath. “And then you’ve let us know you just wish to be terminated.”

"I do think this is something bold and different, and it’s not meant to intimidate or scare anybody. It’s meant to say, ‘Do you want to be part of this?’”

Dunleavy told the Daily New the request for resignation letters was a way of giving “people an opportunity to think about whether they want to remain with this administration and be able to have a conversation with us.”

Dr. Anthony Blanford and Dr. John Bellville were among those who refused to sign the Dunleavy pledge. Both men said they were doctors, not politicians and that the political oath was offensive.

“The state of Alaska hired me for my expertise, not my political allegiance. My moral allegiance is to the mentally ill and the staff who care for them,” Blanford said in a letter to the editor of the Daily News.

In his decision, Sedwick cited numerous court decisions on patronage cases and violations of employee rights. He said that the actions by Dunleavy and Babcock were not as direct as the cases he mentioned in his ruling, but asking more than 800 employees for a pledge was “sufficiently analogous to be considered an unconstitutional patronage practice.”

“It is undisputed the resignation plan was designed to communicate to employees that they needed to express a desire to work for the Dunleavy administration in order to retain their jobs,” he wrote.

“Mr. Babcock was quoted as affirming that the purpose of the mass resignation request was to have employees commit to working for the Dunleavy administration and its agenda in particular, rather than just staying in place as part of the usual bureaucracy.”

Dunleavy and Babcock “were requiring an ostensible commitment of political support, or at least deference, in return for continued employment, the effect of which was to either interfere with or chill employees’ exercise of protected First Amendment rights.”

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