> Today, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) announces a new advisory rescinding the Hatch Act advisory opinion dated May 20, 2024, and a related advisory opinion dated October 15, 2024. The Hatch Act, a federal law passed in 1939, limits certain political activity of federal employees while they are on duty, in the federal workplace, or acting in their official capacity. The new Hatch Act advisory opinion (the “April 25 Advisory") supersedes the May 20, 2024, and October 15, 2024, opinions in three ways.
> First, OSC will return to its traditional practice of referring Hatch Act violations by White House Commissioned officers to the President for appropriate action.
> Second, OSC is pausing the referral of cases against former employees to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) until the legal question concerning jurisdiction is resolved.
> Third, OSC is discarding the “year-round workplace political item prohibition" on wearing or displaying of political candidate or political party items in the workplace related to the campaigns of “current or contemporaneous political figures (CCPFs)." In practice, the blanket prohibition created too great a burden on First Amendment interests.
So not judicial nor legislative. The Hatch Act has not changed, the president's OSC appointee has unsurprisingly decided that executive will investigate itself.
While you can grasp the barest of threads that your original statement was true because the OSC is "official" and anyone is afforded an interpretation, it's really goddamn deceptive. If anything is "the" intepretation it's derived from statute and/or common law, not one side's lawyers.
I mean, the OSC isn't some bunch of randoms who call themselves "official" for funsies. Violations of the Hatch Act fall under their jurisdiction. They're the ones that investigate violations. They put out a statement that says political messages (of a certain kind) are totally fine.
This means, to me, that claiming "The official interpretation of the Hatch act was changed" isn't at all a stretch. The officials,
the ones in charge of interpreting it, put out a statement saying they've changed how they're interpreting it. How is that deceptive? What words would you use instead?
The judiciary interprets the law. As I said, you can narrowly say OSC is "official" and "interprets" the law, but it's a deceptive way to describe the situation. Hopefully we'll see another group successully claim standing for being harmed by Hatch Act violations.
An honest way to describe the situation is "the Trump OSC has decided that Trump should investigate Trump and it is unclear if anyone else can sue for relief from a politicized civil service". At the very least "they've put out a statement saying they've changed their interpretation" is far better than the passive voice.
It feels off to frame this as a routine legal question when the branches themselves aren’t behaving routinely. The current executive has reduced the other branches to handmaidens of its will.
> Today, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) announces a new advisory rescinding the Hatch Act advisory opinion dated May 20, 2024, and a related advisory opinion dated October 15, 2024. The Hatch Act, a federal law passed in 1939, limits certain political activity of federal employees while they are on duty, in the federal workplace, or acting in their official capacity. The new Hatch Act advisory opinion (the “April 25 Advisory") supersedes the May 20, 2024, and October 15, 2024, opinions in three ways.
> First, OSC will return to its traditional practice of referring Hatch Act violations by White House Commissioned officers to the President for appropriate action.
> Second, OSC is pausing the referral of cases against former employees to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) until the legal question concerning jurisdiction is resolved.
> Third, OSC is discarding the “year-round workplace political item prohibition" on wearing or displaying of political candidate or political party items in the workplace related to the campaigns of “current or contemporaneous political figures (CCPFs)." In practice, the blanket prohibition created too great a burden on First Amendment interests.