Hatcheting Hatch

Civil servants are supposed to be nonpolitical toilers in the vineyards of government. To help assure their immunity from temptation--and from the pressures of officials seeking to use them in re-election campaigns--the Hatch Act of 1939 forbade most federal employees from taking "any active part in political management or in political campaigns." "Little Hatch acts" followed in some states and municipalities, covering the local firemen, policemen, clerks and dogcatchers.

All in all, the rules seemed to provide a thoroughly estimable state of bureaucratic neutrality--except to a growing number of civil servants who objected to their loss of free speech and association. Recently a few courts have begun questioning the restrictions. Last week a three-judge federal court in Washington, D.C., voted 2-1 to end the Hatch Act's ban on political activity. The court ruled that it was too broad and unconstitutionally vague.

Pointing out that the act had embodied a disconnected series of earlier civil service rulings, Judge Gerhard Gesell said that it had been used to cover even a person who bet on an election, who drunkenly criticized a political party, or who failed to discourage a spouse's political activity. Gesell conceded that there was an "obvious, well-established governmental interest" in some restriction on civil servants' political activity, a clear hint that a more narrowly drawn law might be permissible. The current law remains in effect, however, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court. Thus the nation's estimated 2.8 million federal civil servants will probably have to sit out the next election, except of course in the privacy of the voting booth.

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