More on the Class of One: Enquist as a Workplace Case

Last week I posted on the Supreme Court's decision in Enquist v. Oregon Dept of Agriculture, where a six-justice majority held that government employees could not challenge employment decisions as equal protection violations under the "class of one" theory of  Village of Willowbrook v. Olech.  That posting concerned the logic of the Court's equal protection analysis.  But Enquist is as much a workplace case as a constitutional law case.  Indeed, the majority frames its equal protection analysis by reference to the distinction between government's power as a sovereign and as an employer.  The opinion (by Roberts) cites Fourth Amendment and Due Process cases, and relies especially heavily on the employee speech cases such as Pickering and Connick.    From those cases it distills two principles: (1) the familiar "balancing" of the employee's constitutional rights against what the Court calls "the realities of the employment context;" and (2) whether the employee's right "implicates the basic concerns of the relevant constitutional provision."

My question is about the applicability of these precedents, especially Pickering and Connick.  My very rough sense of those cases is that avoidance of litigation is not itself the government interest that needs to be balanced against the employee's speech rights.  Rather, it's the interest in running an efficient office -- which in the speech context usually means an office free of insubordination.  So too, for that matter, with search and seizure cases: in those cases I would think the government's interest is in being able to control the physical workplace.

In Enquist I would think the strongest argument for an analogy is that the government has an interest in making what the Court calls "subjective" and "individualized" decisions that simply don't allow the kind of "fit" analysis that is a staple of equal protection review.  I might be splitting hairs, but that sort of justification doesn't seem grounded in the actual day-to-day needs of government-as-employer.  Of course the Court also notes that a ruling for the plaintiff would conflict with the doctrine of employment-at-will.  Again, though, what is it about the day-to-day operations of government that requires adherence to that doctrine (especially given how much erosion employment-at-will has suffered)?

I freely confess I don't know much about workplace law, so maybe I'm missing something obvious about either that body of doctrine or the intersection of that doctrine with constitutional rights law.  But my intuition tells me that there's a difference between government saying "sometimes we need to be able to punish employees based on what they say" and "sometimes we need to make arbitrary, even vindictive, termination decisions."  The first statement seems closely tied to day-to-day efficient operations in government offices, while the latter seems closer to a simple request for legal immunity.

Now, the Court's opening discussion in Enquist does cite one case that seems somewhat more on point -- Bishop v. Wood, where the Court held that procedural due process did not extend to a police officer's claim that he was fired based on an erroneous claim that he committed malfeasance on the job.  Enquist cites Bishop's statement that due process "is not a guarantee against incorrect or ill-advised personnel decisions."  But that statement seems to be complete dicta given the issues Bishop had to decide.

Ultimately, maybe the formal logic doesn't matter to the Court -- what matters is that the conservative majority is on a campaign to close off the government workplace as a locus for the exercise of all but the most basic constitutional rights.  I'd love to hear the opinions of workplace law experts on that.  At the end of the day is that the best, or the only, way to explain Enquist?  Does it go beyond Connick and Pickering and the Fourth Amendment cases in terms of its reasoning?