Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 665.0

524US2

Unit: $U95

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NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR ARTS v. FINLEY

Souter, J., dissenting

seeking to create art that celebrates a minority, tribal, rural,
or inner-city culture. But even so, this is certainly a case in
which the challenged statute “reaches a substantial number
of impermissible applications,” not one in which the statute’s
“legitimate reach dwarfs its arguably impermissible applica-
Id., at 771, 773. On the contrary, nothing in the
tions.”
record suggests that the grant scheme administered under
the broad authorization of the NEA’s governing statute, see
§§ 951, 954(c), devotes an overwhelming proportion of its re-
sources to schools and ethnic commemoration. Since the de-
cency and respect criteria may not be employed in the very
many instances in which the art seeking a subsidy is neither
aimed at children nor meant to celebrate a particular culture,
the statute is facially overbroad. Cf. City of Lakewood,
supra, at 766 (“[I]n a host of . . . First Amendment cases we
have . . . considered on the merits facial challenges to stat-
utes or policies that embodied discrimination based on the
content or viewpoint of expression, or vested ofﬁcials with
open-ended discretion that threatened the same, even where
it was assumed that a properly drawn law could have greatly
restricted or prohibited the manner of expression or circula-
tion at issue”). Accordingly, the Court’s observation that
there are a handful of permissible applications of the decency
and respect proviso, even if true, is irrelevant.15

15 The Court seemingly concedes that these isolated constitutional appli-
cations are in fact of little matter. For after speaking of speciﬁc applica-
tions that may be valid, the Court goes on to admit that these “would
not alone be sufﬁcient to sustain the statute.” Ante, at 585. The Court
nonetheless upholds the statute because it is not “persuaded that, in other
applications, the language of § 954(d)(1) itself will give rise to the suppres-
sion of protected expression.”
Ibid. This conclusion appears to rest on
some combination of (a) the Court’s competition rationale as distinguishing
Rosenberger and justifying the discrimination, (b) the Court’s reading of
the decency and respect proviso as something other than viewpoint based,
and (c) the Court’s treatment of “taking into consideration” as establishing
no ﬁrm mandate subject to constitutional scrutiny. As already explained,