over what Churchill had been fired for to remand the case to district court for that determination. Souter added a concurrence clarifying that the employers can act against unprotected employee speech when they believe their facts about the speech to be true, rather than just the result of a reasonable investigation. He also noted that, since the plurality holding had been joined by the other majority justices in one aspect and the dissenting justices in another, it was in fact a majority opinion. In a separate concurrence, Antonin Scalia wrote for himself, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy that adverse personnel actions for speech by public employees violate the First Amendment only when their purpose is clearly retaliatory, as he believed it had been in Pickering. He attacked the plurality opinion as creating a poorly defined procedural requirement that might well prove unworkable in practice. Plurality opinion "There is no dispute in this case about when speech by a government employee is protected by the First Amendment," began O'Connor's analysis, after she recounted the facts of the case. "The dispute is over how the factual basis for applying the test—what the speech was, in what tone it was delivered, what the listener's reactions were—is to be determined." She agreed with Churchill that some reliable procedures were necessary to protect First Amendment rights, and cited several cases that imposed such procedural requirements, primarily in the area of defamation law. O'Connor rejected the narrower protection Scalia advocated in his concurrence. "Speech can be chilled and punished by administrative action as much as by judicial processes; in no case have we asserted or even implied the contrary." To the plurality, however, it did not follow that all possible procedural review was constitutionally necessary. The Court had in some past defamation cases declined to apply the actual malice standard, even though doing so would strengthen free-speech protections, she noted. It was, O'Connor agreed with Scalia, inconvenient that no general test existed for these cases. So, "[w]e must therefore reconcile ourselves to answering the question on a case-by-case basis, at least until some workable general rule emerges." The general principle, from Pickering and previous cases had established that "the government as employer indeed has far broader powers than does the government as sovereign". No one, she suggested, would dispute that a government agency could bar its employees from wearing, on the job, clothing decorated with profanity,