2: “Whistleblower” only seems to be a defense for lefties attacking Republicans. Pardom me if I yaw when it becomes harder, therefore, to become one.

Xrlq complains that public employees should not have greater rights than private employees. We don’t. We all have the same right: not to have the government treat us badly based on the viewpoints we express.

That, plus the right to collect a paycheck from the government, which the rest of us only have a right to pay money to. The rest of us have no analogous rights as against our private employers.

Actually, the opinion isn’t ridiculous, but I do think that you are downplaying the downside to your preferred rule. Exposing police misconduct is a pretty black-and-white case, but if you are going to provide Constitutional protection to this case, what about less clear-cut cases? Do you want every case of a prosecutor defying his bosses over how he writes a memo to end up before the federal courts to decide if _this_ incident was really a matter of free speech or not?

How is any government manager going to control what goes on in his office if he can’t even control what memos people write or what they put in the memos? The Supremes would have been abrogating their duties if they let the specific nature of this case influence the general rule that they applied.

The whole idea of applying First Ammendment protections to the government’s treatment of employees in the course of their job is risky. The Bill of Rights is intended to give people freedom, but when you agree to become an employee of any organization, you have to subjugate your freedom as long as you want to be employed. The Constitution says that the government can’t deprive anyone of their liberty without due process. Does that mean that if the government fires someone for not showing up for work, they have violated the constitution? After all, forcing someone to be at a particular place at a particular time, doing a particular thing sounds a lot like depriving someone of their liberty.