and held that these deficiencies were sufficiently serious to warrant the imposition of EEO misrepresentation, but not severe enough to warrant license non-renewal. The Judge, however, did impose an initial forfeiture of $50,000 for the willful and repeated violation of the FCC's EEO minority recruiting requirements. The Church, upon appeal to the Commission, argued that the implication that it did not comply with the Commission's EEO requirements violated its constitutional right to religious freedom by improperly evaluating its recruitment efforts and employment criteria. However, the Court of Appeals had held in the past, that the enforcement of the Commission's EEO rules do not violate a licensee's constitutional rights. The Commission, the Administrative Law Judge, and the Review Board agreed that the Church's recruitment efforts were deficient but because only one of the violations fell within the three-year statute of limitations in effect at that time, the amount of the forfeiture was reduced to $25,000, the maximum fine permitted for a single violation of the Commission's rules. Ruling On April 14, 1998 the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found the FCC's Equal Employment Opportunity program requirements unconstitutional. The judge presiding over the case, Laurence Silberman, offered an explanation for the court's decision, stating that the FCC based its case on preventing workplace discrimination and promoting diversity of programming. However, the court found that the FCC does not have the authority to declare regulations using an anti-discrimination rationale. This is because the purpose of the FCC is to safeguard the public interest. The court had previously stated that agencies can impose anti-discrimination regulations only when they specifically relate to that agency's statutory charge. Therefore, it holds that the instances in which the FCC has the authority to pass anti-discriminatory measures would be one in which the discrimination in question related to "communication services" - which, in this case, means programming. Another explanation offered by Silberman is that the phrase "diversity of programming" is incredibly vague and any further attempts to identify what that means would put it in conflict with the First Amendment. Therefore, such a concept is not meaningful. Response The FCC, the NAACP, and several high-profile civil right leaders voiced strong opposition to the decision, such as in this quote by FCC Commissioner Gloria Tristanion. The FCC initially petitioned the District of Columbia District Court for an en banc rehearing of the case with