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Page Number: 11.0

8 

AGENCY FOR INT’L DEVELOPMENT v. ALLIANCE FOR 

OPEN SOCIETY INT’L, INC. 

Opinion of the Court 

notion that First Amendment rights are somehow not fully
realized unless they are subsidized by the State” (internal 
quotation marks omitted)). 

At the same time, however, we have held that the Gov-
ernment  “ ‘may  not  deny  a  benefit  to  a  person  on  a  basis 
that infringes his constitutionally protected . . . freedom of
speech  even  if  he  has  no  entitlement  to  that  benefit.’ ” 
Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, supra, at 59 
(quoting American Library Assn., supra, at 210).  In some 
cases, a funding condition can result in an unconstitution-
al  burden  on  First  Amendment  rights.    See  Forum  for 
Academic and Institutional Rights, supra, at 59 (the First 
Amendment supplies “a limit on Congress’ ability to place 
conditions on the receipt of funds”).

The dissent thinks that can only be true when the condi-
tion  is  not  relevant  to  the  objectives  of  the  program  (al- 
though it has its doubts about that), or when the condition 
is actually coercive, in the sense of an offer that cannot be
refused.  See  post,  at  2–3  (opinion  of  SCALIA,  J.).  Our 
precedents,  however,  are  not  so  limited.    In  the  present 
context,  the  relevant  distinction  that  has  emerged  from
our  cases  is  between  conditions  that  define  the  limits  of 
the government spending program—those that specify the
activities  Congress  wants  to  subsidize—and  conditions 
that  seek  to  leverage  funding  to  regulate  speech  outside 
the  contours  of  the  program  itself.  The  line  is  hardly 
clear,  in  part  because  the  definition  of  a  particular  pro-
gram  can  always  be  manipulated  to  subsume  the  chal-
lenged condition.  We have held, however, that “Congress 
cannot  recast  a  condition  on  funding  as  a  mere  definition 
of its program in every case, lest the First Amendment be
reduced  to  a  simple  semantic  exercise.”    Legal  Services 
Corporation v. Velazquez, 531 U. S. 533, 547 (2001).

A  comparison  of  two  cases  helps  illustrate  the  distinc-
tion:  In  Regan  v.  Taxation  With  Representation  of  Wash-
ington,  the  Court  upheld  a  requirement  that  nonprofit