Automatic-reply, out-of-office (OOO) emails are generally informative, innocuous and noncontroversial. They’re frequently formulaic—templates abound—and Microsoft offers instructions for their creation.

However, the OOO emails at the heart of a First Amendment-based complaint filed by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) against the US Department of Education and Linda McMahon during last fall’s 43-day government shutdown were anything but generic, banal, and purely factual. As US District Judge Christopher Cooper recently explained in AFGE v. US Department of Education, the government—without the consent of furloughed, rank-and-file department employees—altered their OOO emails to convey the “blatantly partisan message” that “Democrat Senators are blocking passage of [legislation] . . . which has led to a lapse in appropriations.”

Cooper deemed this unconstitutional, reasoning that “when government employees enter public service, they do not sign away their First Amendment rights, and they certainly do not sign up to be a billboard for any given administration’s partisan views.”  In permanently barring the compelled, politically fraught OOO emails, Cooper added that “political officials are free to blame whomever they wish for the shutdown, but they cannot use rank-and-file civil servants as their unwilling spokespeople. The First Amendment stands in their way. The Department’s conduct therefore must cease.”

Despite what Cooper called the case’s “novelty,” the outcome and his logic comport easily with three fundamental principles: (1) the First Amendment safeguards citizens from being compelled by the government to express objectionable political and ideological messages; (2) government employees have First Amendment speech rights under the US Supreme Court’s public-employee speech doctrine; and (3) key purposes of the Hatch Act are “to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace” and “maintain a federal workforce that is free from partisan political influence.” Here’s how these principles worked together in AFGE v. US Department of Education.

Compelled Speech. The First Amendment right not to speak has, among other things, safeguarded public school students from being forced to salute and pledge allegiance to the nation’s flag and permitted New Hampshire residents to conceal the state’s “Live Free or Die” motto on their automobile license plates due to moral and religious objections. The Court observed in the latter case that “a system which secures the right to proselytize . . . political . . . causes must also guarantee the concomitant right to decline to foster such concepts.”

Judge Cooper reasoned that the Education Department created “an unacceptable risk” that recipients of the automatically sent, politically loaded OOO emails that included “employees’ names and e-mail addresses” would attribute the blame-the-Democrats viewpoint to the employee senders. He explained that:

common experience teaches that individual employees typically draft their own out-of-office responses and are not forced to include specific language dictated by their employers. Moreover, the employee[s] did not have an opportunity to disavow the message or otherwise clarify their personal views because they cannot access their government e-mail account.

In short, the government forced employees to convey political perspectives that OOO email recipients would assume the employees “authored” or “at least endorsed.”

Public-Employee Speech Rights and the Hatch Act. The Supreme Court has determined “that citizens do not surrender their First Amendment rights by accepting public employment.” As I’ve explained, the Court’s framework for analyzing public employees’ speech rights developed “in a series of opinions highlighted by Pickering v. Board of Education (1968), Connick v. Myers (1983), Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), and Lane v. Franks (2014).”

Public employees who are not speaking pursuant to their official job duties, but who are commenting about matters of public concern, possess constitutional speech rights. Those rights, however, must be balanced against the government’s interest in effectively and efficiently delivering its services to the public. The twist here was that the government put––for some dissenting workers––objectionable words in their furloughed mouths. This wasn’t a case of an employee posting his personal opinions about a matter of public concern on social media while at home.

Applying this framework, Judge Cooper found that including “a blatantly partisan message” in OOO emails was “not within the . . . employees’ job responsibilities.” The government, in turn, didn’t dispute that “who bears responsibility for the government shutdown” was a matter of public concern.

Next, Cooper balanced the employees’ interest in not conveying political messages against the government’s interest in forcing them to do so. The Hatch Act proved important here, with Cooper emphasizing that “nonpartisanship is the foundation of the federal civil-service system.” This constituted a “special interest” in employees’ “maintaining neutrality” that strongly militated against the government-compelled political emails. Conversely, Cooper found that the Education Department “failed to identify . . . any legitimate interest whatsoever in using” employees’ emails “to promulgate partisan political statements.”

In sum, the government’s unconstitutional, OOO no-no illustrates that public employees aren’t manipulable political pawns.