Hudson v. Am. Fed'n of Gov't Emps.

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EUGENE HUDSON, JR., Plaintiff, v. AMERICAN FEDERATION OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES, Defendant.

Civil Action No. 22-289 (JEB)

United States District Court, District of Columbia

October 31, 2022

MEMORANDUM OPINION

James E. Boasberg United States District Judge

Earlier this year, Plaintiff Eugene Hudson, Jr. brought a hodgepodge of claims alleging that Defendant American Federation of Government Employees unlawfully denied him membership in the Union. AFGE moved to dismiss the Complaint. It argued that the Civil Service Reform Act's (CSRA) exclusive-review scheme preempted his lawsuit, and that this Court therefore lacked jurisdiction to consider his various counts. The Union added, moreover, that issue preclusion barred even reopening that jurisdictional question because this Court had already resolved it in AFGE's favor in a prior case involving the same parties and very similar causes of action.

This Court largely agreed. It granted the motion on the basis of preclusion as to all but a single claim buried in Hudson's Complaint: his Labor Management Relations Act (LMRA) claim “on behalf of Local 3723,” which asserted that AFGE had violated its own constitution when it declined to retroactively recognize Hudson as a member of Local 3723 after the Local voted to admit him. The Court found that because this claim was not sufficiently similar to the other membership claims in the prior case, the question of its preemption had not yet been decided and preclusion was thus not warranted. The Court then engaged in an independent preemption analysis. It concluded that the claim was not preempted because it arose from the relationship between a national union and its local, not the relationship between Hudson and AFGE, and so was collateral to the statute's review scheme. The Union now asks the Court to reconsider its decision on the LMRA claim. It explains that the Court's distinction between types of claim is not legally significant, and so the LMRA claim is precluded by its prior holding. The Court agrees, will grant the Motion, and dismiss the case.

I. Legal Standard

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b) provides that interlocutory decisions may be “revised at any time before the entry of a judgment adjudicating all the claims” in the action. Reconsideration of such decisions is “available under the standard ‘as justice requires,'” which affords courts wide latitude and substantial discretion. Mahoney v. U.S. Capitol Police Bd., 566 F.Supp.3d 22, 25 (D.D.C. 2022) (citation and internal quotations omitted); see also Capitol Sprinkler Inspection, Inc. v. Guest Servs., Inc., 630 F.3d 217 227 (D.C. Cir. 2011). The court's task, essentially, is to determine “whether [relief upon] reconsideration is necessary under the relevant circumstances.” Lewis v. Dist. of Columbia, 736 F.Supp.2d 98, 102 (D.D.C. 2010) (quoting Cobell v. Norton, 224 F.R.D. 266, 272 (D.D.C. 2004)). Amorphous as that standard may seem, it is grounded in concrete considerations and “hardly [offers] a free pass.” Mahoney, 566 F.Supp.3d at 25; Singh v. George Washington Univ., 383 F.Supp.2d 99, 101 (D.D.C. 2005) (noting that “as justice requires” standard entails considerations such as whether court “patently misunderstood a party, has made a decision outside the adversarial issues presented to the Court by the parties, has made an error not of reasoning but of apprehension, or where a controlling or significant change in the law or facts [has occurred] since the submission of the issue to the Court”).

II. Analysis

The Court first considers whether it is appropriate even to revisit its earlier decision. After deciding that issue in the affirmative, it next analyzes the merits of the question.

A. Reconsideration

The Union asks the Court to reconsider its conclusion that Hudson's LMRA claim should not be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. See ECF No. 47 (Motion for Reconsideration) at 5-6. Hudson rejoins that the Court has already decided this issue and has no business retreading the same ground. See ECF No. 48 (Opp. to Motion for Reconsideration) at 1-3. The Court disagrees.

According to AFGE, the Court should not have retained the LMRA claim on the erroneous ground that it was collateral to the dismissed membership claims. “A claim is not collateral to a statutory scheme, and therefore may be preempted, if it is at bottom an attempt to reverse an action that is covered by the scheme.” Mot. at 5 (citations and internal quotations omitted). And the LMRA claim, AFGE continues, is “at bottom” an attempt to reverse AFGE's denial of Hudson's membership rights, even if it is nominally on Local 3723's behalf. Id. at 5-6. That is a new argument. In its Motion to Dismiss, AFGE grouped Hudson's counts together and discussed CSRA preemption of them in broad strokes. As a consequence of that approach, Defendant did not address whether or how the facial dissimilarities of the LMRA claim to the rest of Hudson's causes of action affected the preemption analysis.

On the one hand, the prior failure to address that issue is a problem for Defendant. Requests for reconsideration typically “cannot be used as . . . a vehicle for presenting theories or arguments that could have been advanced earlier.” Loumiet v. United States, 65 F.Supp.3d 19, 24 (D.D.C. 2014) (citations and internal quotations omitted). On the other hand, the Court recognizes that the fault for AFGE's incomplete briefing at the motion-to-dismiss stage does not fall entirely - or even mostly - on AFGE. As this Court previously noted, Hudson's Complaint was “no model of clarity.” Hudson v. AFGE (Hudson Membership II), No. 22-289, 2022 WL 3786919, at *4 (D.D.C. Aug. 30, 2022). The surviving claim was scattered across two counts, both of which were titled as claims “for violation of Plaintiff's rights” under the LMRA. See ECF No. 1 (Complaint) at 35-36 (emphasis added). Neither count spelled out the contours of the alleged LMRA violation in any detail. The Court was able to piece together a rough outline of the claim only upon a close reading of scattered paragraphs in the Complaint, see id., 247, 256, and, even then, it was still left with notable blanks to fill (for example, Hudson had failed to specify which AFGE Constitutional provision had been violated, so the Court added the missing piece, Hudson Membership II, 2022 WL 3786919, at *11). In that context, it is not clear that AFGE's specific arguments about this Court's jurisdiction to consider the LMRA claim “could have been advanced earlier.” Loumiet, 65 F.Supp.3d at 24. Rather, it appears that AFGE is reasonably asking for an opportunity to respond directly to a claim that was obfuscated in Hudson's Complaint and clarified by this Court's Opinion. In these unique circumstances, “justice requires” that it be permitted to do so.

Reconsideration is appropriate under the circumstances of this case for another critical reason: AFGE's argument is jurisdictional, and jurisdiction is a unique issue. “If the court determines at any time that it lacks subject-matter jurisdiction, the court must dismiss the action.” Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(h)(3) (emphasis added). A court may thus entertain a motion for reconsideration raising a possible jurisdictional defect “at any time irrespective of whether the requirements of Rule 54(b) are satisfied.” Said v. Nat'l R.R. Passenger Corp., 390 F.Supp.3d 46, 52 (D.D.C. 2019), aff'd, 815 Fed.Appx. 561 (D.C. Cir. 2020).

Having determined that reconsideration is appropriate here, the Court will now evaluate AFGE's argument on the merits.

B. Merits

Before diving in, the Court will define the precise scope of the issue presented here. That requires going back to 2019, when Hudson brought his first Complaint protesting AFGE's refusal to recognize his membership in the Union. Hudson v. AFGE (Hudson Membership I), No. 19-2738, 2020 WL 3035039 (D.D.C. June 5, 2020). This Court dismissed that suit for lack of jurisdiction. It held that the CSRA preempts (a) grievances relating to exclusion from membership in AFGE that are (b) brought by Hudson or someone in his position. Hudson Membership II, 2022 WL 3786919, at *5, 8.

A few years later, Hudson tried his luck once more by filing a Complaint in this case, which pleading included the LMRA claim plus a host of other claims that more closely resembled those in Hudson Membership I. Id. at *1-3. This Court relied on issue preclusion to dismiss the bulk of that Complaint for lack of jurisdiction. In so doing, it declined to revisit its conclusion that the “CSRA provide[s] the exclusive means of redress for Plaintiff's grievances related to his exclusion from membership in an AFGE Local.” Id. at *5. It also found that all but one of the claims in Hudson's Complaint presented precisely such a grievance. Id. Hudson Membership I therefore dictated that this Court lacked jurisdiction to consider those claims.

The LMRA claim, however, survived the motion to dismiss on very narrow grounds. This Court first found that the question of its preemption had not been decided by Hudson Membership I because the LMRA claim was a “different beast” from the rest. Id. at *10. In other words, unlike the majority of his claims in both membership cases, the LMRA claim was not a grievance brought by Hudson about his exclusion from membership in AFGE, and issue preclusion thus did not apply. The Court therefore conducted a preemption analysis anew and found that the LMRA claim was collateral to the CSRA's review scheme and so was not preempted.

AFGE now contends that the Court erred at the first juncture. According to Defendant, the LMRA claim is the same as the rest of Hudson's membership claims - at least for preemption purposes. If AFGE is correct about that, and if no other exceptions to preemption apply,...