In 2019, Spokane mayoral candidate Nadine Woodward took a strong stand against what state Representative Matt Shea believed and how he expressed it. An investigation commissioned by the state legislature had accused Shea, then representing Spokane Valley, of supporting domestic terrorism for his role in the armed occupation of Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Woodward, who was running for office, didn’t mince words.
"I strongly condemn Matt Shea's extreme rhetoric and ideology," Woodward said.
But four years later, at a religious rally held by controversial Christian worship leader Sean Feucht, the relationship between the two very different conservatives seemed to have changed.
Shea, now a local pastor, declared that Jesus Christ was the answer to “problems” like “homosexual marriage” and “transgender issues” and then called Mayor Woodward to join him on the stage. There she stood beside Shea, the man she had once denounced. She nodded her head and mouthed words in prayer, then accepted a hug from him as he left the stage.
The brief alliance was very short lived: Woodward, then campaigning for a second term, condemned Shea a second time in the days after, claiming she didn’t know he was going to be at the event.
But the incident brought a chorus of condemnation from her critics, made national headlines and spurred the City Council to narrowly pass a resolution condemning her actions.
“The Spokane City Council formally denounces Mayor Nadine Woodward's actions that affiliated the City of Spokane and its residents with former Washington State Representative and identified domestic terrorist, Matt Shea, and known anti-LGBTQ extremist Sean Feucht,” the resolution read.
That November, Woodward lost reelection.
But there may be a particularly lucrative upside for Woodward in all this: She’s filed a tort claim with the city, threatening a $10 million lawsuit in response to the city council’s resolution.
The proposed lawsuit claims the resolution violated Woodward’s free speech rights. The council has maintained they were only using their own free speech rights, objecting to the mayor’s actions without leveling any penalty.
This isn’t a new argument: Woodward originally filed the claim two years ago, represented herself, and asked for $1.4 million. But now she has a hard-charging lawyer who upped the ante to $10 million — over 50 times her annual mayoral salary.
That attorney, Mary Schultz, is not to be underestimated. She was the attorney whose gender discrimination case sent the Spokane Country Club into bankruptcy. She was the attorney who won a $19.5 million verdict against the Spokane Sheriff on behalf of a deputy fired after being accused of racism and harassment.
Today, Schultz is arguing that Woodward’s case goes far beyond just what happened to the mayor.
“What this is about is this city's City Council compelling only favored speech and punishing people for engaging in disfavored speech,” Schultz said. “A legislative body simply cannot do that. That's not their role. And what was done here was flatly unconstitutional.”
She argues the illegal nature of the resolution should have been obvious.
“How something like this could pass is beyond my comprehension,” Schultz said. “I think anyone who has any inkling of First Amendment law would look at something like this and say, ‘What in the world were they doing? How did this get passed?’”
Yet others with plenty of inklings of First Amendment law knowledge say different. At least two judges have already rejected claims in lawsuits from Shea and Feucht that the resolution represented a violation of anyone’s free speech.
And RANGE shared the legal claim with one of the preeminent free speech legal organizations in the country, the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression. FIRE has a long record of suing powerful institutions on both sides of the political aisle over free speech violations.
Aaron Terr, FIRE’s director of public advocacy for FIRE, couldn’t identify a clear free speech problem with the Spokane resolution.
"If this is just a non-binding resolution that's just denouncing the mayor's associations, I think she'll have a very difficult time making out a First Amendment argument," Tarr said.
Even if the resolution exposed the mayor to vehement criticism or swung the election, he sees that as the First Amendment working as intended.
“That point of speech — that it does persuade people to change people's opinions about things or to vote one way or another — that's just all part of politics,” Tarr said.
FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh, meanwhile, had a more cutting informal response after RANGE sent him the text of Woodward’s proposed suit.
“I prefer it in the original crayon,” Steinbaugh said. “Is it being placed on someone’s fridge?”
City Council's toothless gums
Legally, governmental bodies are generally prohibited from taking actions that would “chill a person of ordinary firmness” from continuing to speak or associate with someone.
In her interview with RANGE, Schultz repeatedly went back to the premise that the council’s resolution represented a clear kind of repression against Woodward’s ability to speak freely. It wasn’t just criticism, she argues. It was legislation. And, she said, the precedent is quite clear about the government trying to legislate viewpoints.
“We cannot have our city become known as a city where its legislature regulates what its citizens can say and what they can't say,” Schultz said. “This should be an embarrassment to the people of Spokane. And it should be an embarrassment to you as a reporter.”
But Council Member Zack Zappone, who sponsored and advocated for the resolution, told RANGE that, while there was a lot of tussling over the difference between, say, using the word “denounce” versus “censure.” But he wasn’t ever worried that the resolution risked harming the mayor’s freedom of speech.
"It is a formal and public statement that we believe her actions were wrong," Zappone had said during the 2023 marathon session when it was passed. "That's all it's saying."
When Terr, of FIRE, read through the resolution, he couldn’t find anything suppressing Woodward’s free speech.
“It does appear on its face to just be a denunciation of the mayor for associating with certain people,” Terr wrote in an email. “It doesn't seem like the natural reading of the resolution is one that requires the mayor to self-censor or stop associating with any particular individual.”
It’s not just him: the two judges who scrutinized the resolution in the Shea and Feucht cases have both declared the resolution was “toothless.”
After Feucht, the worship leader who headlined the event, sued the city and the four individual council members who voted for the resolution, Superior Court Judge Rachelle Anderson tossed out the case entirely. Among other issues with his case, she declared that the resolution was not "regulatory, proscriptive or compulsory," and that it contained "no punitive or censorial action, or even a threat of potential punishment or censorship."
Feucht is currently appealing.
Similarly, the federal judge in Shea’s case, James Goeke, wrote that the resolution was simply the city council’s own constitutionally protected speech, without any enforcement provision.
“The Resolution represents a policy statement, an instance of the government speaking for itself, rather than lawmaking because it lacks the hallmarks of a law,” Goeke wrote in his opinion.
He noted that “legislative bodies have passed such resolutions since the early days of the Republic to express their collective opinions whether by denouncing a president, railing against socialism, or affirming a welcoming community free of violence.”
Indeed, just a few years ago, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution censuring President Joe Biden and multiple administration officials by name for the botched pullout of Afghanistan.
“Did Joe Biden sue?” Schultz asked when RANGE floated the example. “Maybe he should have.”
The judges in both the Shea and the Feucht lawsuits cited a 2002 case where the city of San Francisco passed a resolution decrying anti-gay television advertisements and urging television stations not to broadcast them. The American Family Association sued on First Amendment grounds, but the 9th Circuit ruled that San Francisco was within its rights.
Courts have found that it was constitutional for the government to try to persuade businesses to stop selling Penthouse magazine or a satirical anti-welfare board game — at least so long as there was no explicit or implicit threat of meaningful governmental retaliation.
In 2022, the US Supreme Court ruled that it hadn’t been shown any evidence that a “purely verbal censure" like that of a Texas community college trustee “has ever been widely considered offensive to the First Amendment.”
“The First Amendment surely promises an elected representative … the right to speak freely on questions of government policy,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote. “But just as surely, it cannot be used as a weapon to silence other representatives seeking to do the same.”
But in that case, Schultz points out, the ruling was limited to a governmental body censuring their own members. This is about city legislators trying to censor the city executive.
And that, she said, is very different.
Mayoral privilege?
Pressed on some of the arguments raised in prior cases, Schultz joked it was like RANGE was serving as the city’s lawyers.
"I don't want to have to try and engage in a preliminary advisory argument with, you know, the coach of the defense team before the game starts," Schultz said.
But Schultz has a plan to make her case succeed where the others have struggled.
Step 1: Schultz points to the city charter saying that the mayor’s job is to ensure that “that all laws and ordinances are faithfully enforced.”
Step 2: While resolutions are often considered non-binding, Schultz argues that, because the city charter does not explicitly define “resolution,” they should be treated like laws or ordinances.
Step 3: Schultz argues that, therefore, by requiring the mayor to faithfully enforce a legislative action denouncing her own speech, you run into all sorts of problems. Separation of powers problems. Compelled speech problems.
Terr, with FIRE, remains unconvinced.
“Even if the mayor has a duty to ‘faithfully enforce"’ all laws and ordinances, I'm not sure there is anything to enforce here,’ Terr said.
But to Schultz, the “authoritarian” and “dangerous” nature of the ordinance was clear.
“Words can convey a message that the writer claims: ‘Oh, I didn't intend that.’ But that's precisely what that language conveys,” Schultz said. “It’s a personal critique of the mayor. … The intent was to impact the election.”
Shea’s case, in federal court, survived on one count: While the version of the resolution on the council agenda referred to him as an “alleged domestic terrorist” the version the council actually passed didn’t hedge, calling Shea an “identified domestic terrorist.” That kind of label, the court ruled, could be enough for Shea to suggest he had been punished without due process. (Shea has since argued he has been exonerated of the accusations.)
Schultz makes a similar argument, declaring that the resolution had marked Woodward with the “brand of infamy or disloyalty” for her associations.
Tallying up the $10 million worth of damages, Schultz said the ordinance “imposed a scarlet letter … which took over the election cycle,” and that Woodward suffered “social and professional isolation,” and “fear of physical harm’ as a result.” She notes that Woodward ultimately lost the election by 2,800 votes.
Yet the Supreme Court has said that, effectively, elected officials should be made of tougher stuff than regular citizens.
“In this country, we expect elected representatives to shoulder a degree of criticism about their public service from their constituents and their peers — and to continue exercising their free speech rights when the criticism comes,” Gorsuch wrote in the 2022 Texas trustee case.
It’s not at all clear that the controversy over Shea’s August 20 prayer swung the election, as opposed to, say, Woodward’s struggle to deliver on her campaign promises to reduce homelessness.
In fact, in the weeks after the event, she disputed the notion that the backlash to her attendance at the rally was wide enough to call a “political firestorm.” The negative comments were from a handful of very vocal people, and her office had been flooded with positive comments from people supportive of her being a “woman of faith” who believes in “the power of prayer.”
It’s also hard to separate the impact of the media coverage of the event itself from the impact of the resolution. After all, the City Council resolution passed on September 25, over a month after the event. By then, there had already been national news coverage.
How many people, exactly, switched their votes or fired off an angry email — not because they had seen Nadine appearing with Matt Shea on Twitter or TikTok or in Rolling Stone or the Washington Post but because some guy named Zack Zappone denounced it in a city council resolution?
“That's a legitimate question,” Schultz said. It’s exactly the kind of question, she says, she will plumb as they get into discovery. But she promises there was an impact, and they’ll be able to prove it.
Today, Woodward is a realtor who proudly touts her legacy as mayor on her real estate website. As with many such lawsuits, this risks exhuming an old moment that the Mayor claims severely damaged her reputation.
But the stakes are higher than just one former mayor.
“This is actually already blooming into a larger stage,” Schultz said. “I've been getting inquiries from bloggers. I've been getting inquiries from independent writers in various First Amendment areas.”
If Woodward wins, it could set a precedent that would reverberate in city council chambers across the region, one that would raise future questions.
If, say, Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown suddenly went on a tirade of grotesque racial slurs — and, to be clear, as of press time she has not — would that mean that the city council or any other governmental body in America would be prohibited from formally condemning her?
And would a mayor be able to put out an official statement, not just condemning a specific constituent and his belief system but calling it a “threat to democracy?”
Because that was what Woodward said in a statement about Matt Shea, one day after appearing with him on stage.
