James R. Fouts v. The Warren City Council, et al.

Where an individual plaintiff challenges under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, as applied to him only, the constitutionality of a city charter provision which bars him from the ballot by providing a lesser term limit for him than for others, are courts to apply the doctrine of Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U.S. 780, 103 S.Ct. 1564, 75 L.Ed.2d 547 (1983), and Burdick v. Takushi, 504 U.S. 428, 112 S.Ct. 2059, 119 L.Ed.2d 245 (1992), or does the Sixth Circuit’s carveout for “term-limit challenges” apply to automatically subject the plaintiff’s claims to rational basis review?

Is the charter provision which kept Petitioner off the 2023 ballot ‘rational’ for purposes of rational basis scrutiny, when its only purpose is to limit all elected officials time in office, and it does not do that, as shown by Michigan state court case Boike v. Green, No. 365681, 2023 WL 3588168, at *1 (Mich. Ct. App. May 22, 2023), in which it was decided that the same charter provision at issue here could not preclude one of Petitioner’s political rivals from running for a fourth term, because he had left one of his prior terms early?

Is ineligibility for a public office a legal disability for purposes of analyzing whether a laws application to Petitioner is impermissibly “retroactive?”