Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
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524US2

Unit: $U95

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Cite as: 524 U. S. 569 (1998)

599

Scalia, J., concurring in judgment

point discrimination unconstitutional, not because funding of
“private” speech was involved, but because the government
had established a limited public forum—to which the NEA’s
granting of highly selective (if not highly discriminating)
awards bears no resemblance.

The nub of the difference between me and the Court is
that I regard the distinction between “abridging” speech and
funding it as a fundamental divide, on this side of which the
First Amendment is inapplicable. The Court, by contrast,
seems to believe that the First Amendment, despite its
words, has some ineffable effect upon funding,
imposing
constraints of an indeterminate nature which it announces
(without troubling to enunciate any particular test) are not
violated by the statute here—or, more accurately, are not
violated by the quite different, emasculated statute that
it imagines.
“[T]he Government,” it says, “may allocate
competitive funding according to criteria that would be im-
permissible were direct regulation of speech or a criminal
penalty at stake,” ante, at 587–588. The Government, I
think, may allocate both competitive and noncompetitive
insofar as the First Amendment is
funding ad libitum,
concerned.

Finally, what is true of the First Amendment is also true
of the constitutional rule against vague legislation: it has no
Insofar as it bears upon First
application to funding.
Amendment concerns, the vagueness doctrine addresses the
problems that arise from government regulation of expres-
sive conduct, see Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U. S. 104,
108–109 (1972), not government grant programs.
In the for-
mer context, vagueness produces an abridgment of lawful
speech; in the latter it produces, at worst, a waste of money.
I cannot refrain from observing, however, that if the vague-
ness doctrine were applicable, the agency charged with mak-
ing grants under a statutory standard of “artistic excel-
lence”—and which has itself thought that standard met by
everything from the playing of Beethoven to a depiction of