A civilian volunteer can lose his position for opinions he typed into LinkedIn and a federal appeals court has decided the government did nothing wrong by removing him for it.
The Seventh Circuit ruled on June 1 that the Coast Guard Auxiliary acted within its rights when it expelled James Wenzler over what he posted online.
We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.
Judge Michael Scudder wrote the decision, joined by Judges Amy St. Eve and Joshua Kolar. The court handed the Auxiliary wide room, which it called deference, to police the speech of the people who serve in it.
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Wenzler joined the Auxiliary in 2007 and worked his way up to Vice Flotilla Commander. The Auxiliary is the unpaid, civilian wing of the Coast Guard. His LinkedIn profile showed him in uniform and listed him as the organization’s Branch Chief for Human Resources. That pairing, his uniform alongside his views, is what the government decided it could not allow.
The trouble started with a complaint when a member of the public flagged two of his posts in May 2022. One of them answered a message congratulating Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Wenzler wrote, “Another racist makes the court to join racist Sotom[a]yor and Kag[a]n. Great job America!”
The second replied to a post praising a Girl Scout who had written a letter to the editor calling an announcement about boy and girl scouts sexist.
Wenzler wrote, “Well if you are proving you are just having fun, then you are. To find something sexist is to show you are the sexist. Perhaps the Girl Scouts should actually accomplish something, but alas they just sell cookies.”
Some considered the comments mean. They are also the sort of thing people scroll past on the platform every hour. The Auxiliary treated them as a disciplinary problem.
District Commodore Harvey Randall sent Wenzler a letter of caution. It ordered him to take down any photo of himself in uniform, delete any mention of his Auxiliary positions, and confirm that he had done so.
He could keep his opinions or keep his uniform showing online, but not both.
By August the Auxiliary found his profile unchanged and dug up more posts. One took a shot at the incoming president of Northwestern University, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. He said she had done a “horrible job” at her former employer, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and “end[ed] up with the physical results of what she was” there.
When the Auxiliary asked one more time, he confirmed he would not comply. They suspended him, ran a disciplinary process and the Coast Guard struck him from its rolls.
Then came the legal question. The First Amendment normally shields a government worker who speaks as a citizen on matters of public concern. Courts apply a two-part test drawn from the Supreme Court’s Connick and Pickering rulings.
The first step asks whether the speech touched a matter of public concern. The second weighs the speaker’s interest in talking against the government’s interest in running an efficient operation.
The court accepted that Wenzler’s posts touched on public concern and moved straight to the balancing, which is where speech usually loses.
The Auxiliary’s interest in “discipline or harmony among co-workers” and continued “public confidence,” the court held, outweighed his interest in saying what he thought.
The court never found that the Auxiliary’s worries were true. It found only that they were reasonable to hold. The Auxiliary, the opinion says, “could have reasonably determined that Wenzler’s speech and actions would be detrimental to the Auxiliary and its reputation.”
The government needed no proof of actual harm, only a plausible guess that harm might follow. The court leaned on its own precedent, that “a public employer may act based on potential disruption so long as its predictions are reasonable.”
Reputation is an elastic standard and that is the trap. Almost any opinion that someone, somewhere, dislikes can be recast as a threat to an organization’s image.
Two members of the public complained and the court offered that as evidence the Auxiliary’s fears about recruiting and retention were sound. Offense reported by a stranger becomes a reason the speaker can be silenced.
Wenzler argued the Auxiliary was really a “government-sponsored fraternity,” an unpaid club where members elect their own leaders and carry no weapons, and so it had no business governing what they say off duty. The court rejected that. Congress folded the Auxiliary into the Coast Guard, gave it a military-style hierarchy and can call on it for genuine missions. That structure, the court reasoned, earns it deference.
Deference means a judge declines to second-guess the government’s own judgment about which speech is too damaging to permit. Wrap an organization in enough statutory language and the court steps back, letting that body decide for itself where the line sits. A volunteer who signed up to help with boating safety now finds his weekend opinions answerable to the same chain of command.
None of this depends on whether Wenzler’s posts were worth defending on their merits. The speech that needs protection is rarely the agreeable kind. A rule that lets a government body remove someone because his words “could have” bruised its image is a rule with no fixed edge, ready for the next person whose opinions are quieter and more inconvenient.
Attach your name to the uniform, say something sharp, and you can be gone, with a court prepared to defer to whoever decides you crossed a boundary that no one can point to in advance.
