National Treasury Employees Union v. Nixon
Decision Date | 25 January 1974 |
Docket Number | No. 72-1929.,72-1929. |
Citation | 492 F.2d 587 |
Parties | NATIONAL TREASURY EMPLOYEES UNION, Appellant, v. Richard M. NIXON, Individually and as President of the United States. |
Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — District of Columbia Circuit |
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George H. Cohen, Washington, D.C., with whom Robert M. Tobias, Washington, D.C., was on the brief for appellant.
Eloise E. Davies, Atty., Dept. of Justice, with whom Harold H. Titus, Jr., U. S. Atty. and Morton Hollander, Atty., Dept. of Justice, were on the brief for appellee.
Before ROBINSON and WILKEY, Circuit Judges, and KAUFMAN,* United States District Judge for the District of Maryland.
Those words, written in February, 1803, comprise the opening paragraphs of Mr. Chief Justice John Marshall's landmark opinion in Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 154, 2 L.Ed. 60 (1803). The Chief Justice, writing for a unanimous Court, answered the first two questions in the affirmative,1 concluding with regard to the first question:
To withhold his commission, therefore, is an act deemed by the court not warranted by law, but violative of a vested legal right. Id. at 162.
Justice Marshall's discussion of the second question included the following:
The third question in Marbury v. Madison, relating to the existence of the mandamus powers of the Supreme Court of the United States, is not present in this case, in which the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), a public employee union, seeks declaratory and injunctive relief and mandamus to require President Nixon to perform what is alleged to be a ministerial act under the Federal Pay Comparability Act (FPCA), 5 U.S.C. § 5301 et seq. (1970) NTEU filed this suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, contending that under Section 5305(a) of the FPCA2 the President was required to implement a comparability pay adjustment for federal employees effective in October, 1972, or to have submitted to the Congress by September 1, 1972 an alternative plan concerning federal pay adjustments; and that President Nixon without legal justification failed to take either course of action. NTEU, on September 14, 1972, originally filed a motion for a preliminary injunction. The District Court dismissed the complaint for lack of jurisdiction, referring to the separation of powers doctrine and also stating that in this case the President's performance of his duty depends upon the "construction and application" of the statutes involved. NTEU continues to seek injunctive, declaratory and mandamus relief herein.
Jurisdiction was originally asserted by NTEU under 28 U.S.C. § 1331(a),3 § 13614 and § 2201.5 However, in oral argument in this Court, counsel for NTEU admitted that Section 1331(a) jurisdiction is lacking because no individual plaintiff has a claim which exceeds $10,000. Thus, since aggregation of individual claims is not permitted under Snyder v. Harris, 394 U.S. 332, 89 S.Ct. 1053, 22 L.Ed.2d 319 (1969)6 for purposes of meeting the $10,000 requirement, Section 1331(a) jurisdiction is lacking herein. Accordingly, subject matter jurisdiction exists only if NTEU has stated a proper claim for mandamus under Section 1361 measured by traditional criteria.
In this case, the same issues posed by the first two of the three questions presented to and answered by Mr. Chief Justice Marshall more than 170 years ago are present, with one most important difference — in this case the President of the United States, not the Secretary of State as in Marbury v. Madison, is the defendant. Precisely put, the two questions raised in this case are:
1. Were the members of plaintiff organization entitled to have the President put into effect their pay raise, as of October, 1972?
2. If the answer to that first question is "Yes", do the laws of this country afford plaintiff a remedy in this case in this Court?
Enacted on January 8, 1971, the FPCA departed from the previously established congressional pattern of dealing ad hoc with federal pay adjustments from time to time and provided a mechanism pursuant to which pay rates for federal employees are adjusted by the President7 in October of each year beginning in 1972 based upon a survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) relating federal pay scales to rates of pay for the comparable levels of work in private enterprise.8 One of the purposes behind the annual October adjustments was to reduce as far as possible the...
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