Court Opinion

ID: 9481416
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:18:31.336108+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:18.327581
License: Public Domain

STEPHEN F. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
Truth-in-judging obligations drive me to confess that I cannot make sense of requiring strict or intermediate scrutiny for a distinction that is concededly content-neutral and free of any hint that it could have been intended to get at content indirectly, simply because the distinction is used to qualify a direct or indirect burden on free speech.
Suppose, for example, that in Austin the Michigan legislature had regarded corporate ability to support political candidates as very important, but outweighed (just barely) by concern over use of “ ‘resources amassed in the economic marketplace’ to obtain ‘an unfair advantage in the political marketplace.’ ” Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, — U.S. -, 110 S.Ct. 1391, 1397, 108 L.Ed.2d 652 (1990). Yet when it came to media corporations, it found the balance tilting (just barely) the other way. Assuming, as the Court concluded, that the tilt against non-media corporations was perfectly valid under the First Amendment, it is not clear why the law should fail merely because the incremental value of unimpeded speech by media corporations was slight — though just enough to make the legislature come out the other way.
If the requirement of a “compelling interest” addresses not the differential between forbidden and allowed speech, but the totality of interests favoring the exempt speech, the formula is equally puzzling. The state will always be able to invoke a constitutionally powerful interest in support of the exemption, to wit, free speech, as an exemption expands the sphere of permissible speech. As the speech interest is always there, it seems odd to set off on a big hunt for a “compelling” justification, which the court is sure to find. To speak of a need for “narrow tailoring” is equally puzzling: it surely cannot be the case that as a general matter the Constitution militates in favor of keeping content-neutral exemptions from free speech bans as narrow as possible.
The requirement of a compelling interest makes sense where there is something offensive about the character of the distinction itself, as is true of distinctions based on race, see, e.g., Loving v. Virginia, 388 *1239U.S. 1, 11, 87 S.Ct. 1817, 1823, 18 L.Ed.2d 1010 (1967), or on a speaker’s message. And a demand for “narrow tailoring” sensibly seeks to assure that the burden imposed upon the burdened classes (in cases where there are unambiguously advantaged and disadvantaged classes as a result of the offensive legislative classification) is no heavier than the interest really justifies. Compare City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 507-08, 109 S.Ct. 706, 728-29, 102 L.Ed.2d 854 (1989) (tailoring inadequate where distinction was advanced on grounds of remedying past discrimination, yet law accorded benefit even to entities that could be proven not to have suffered from discrimination in any relevant way). Some form of heightened scrutiny (though not necessarily compelling interest/narrow tailoring) also is appropriate where the ban is so narrow as to arouse suspicion either that the legislature could have been retaliating against a speaker’s message, compare News America Publishing, Inc. v. FCC, 844 F.2d 800, 810-14 (D.C.Cir.1988) (applying intermediate scrutiny to burden on closed class of a single First Amendment actor), or attempting “to pick and choose only a few to whom they will apply legislation and thus to escape the political retribution that might be visited upon them if larger numbers were affected”, Railway Express Agency, Inc. v. New York, 336 U.S. 106, 112-13, 69 S.Ct. 463, 467, 93 L.Ed. 533 (1949) (Jackson, J., concurring); cf. Kucharek v. Hanaway, 902 F.2d 513, 520-21 (7th Cir.1990) (rejecting any special scrutiny for content-neutral exemptions from ban on obscene materials). These situations may not exhaust the field of eases requiring special judicial concern, but, unless the special instances become the rule rather than the exception, they can hardly explain heightened scrutiny across the board.
Where there is nothing at all suspicious about the legislative distinction, it would seem enough for courts to inquire simply into the rationality or reasonableness of the trade-off. We know we have strong interests on both sides of the balance (free speech on one side, and on the other whatever state interest enabled the restriction to survive First Amendment attack). Could reasonable legislators have found that there was marginally more need for the exempt speech, or that the interests favoring restriction were marginally less compelling? If so, and as always assuming the absence of any signs of legislative manipulation, neither First Amendment nor equal protection values seem to require more. Indeed, it would not be outlandish to read Austin as in substance finding no more than such a reasonable trade-off. See 110 S.Ct. at 1402; compare id. at 1414 (Scalia, J., dissenting); id. at 1425 (Kennedy, J., dissenting).
In any event, whatever the problems strict scrutiny may pose when applied to content-neutral distinctions in direct bans on speech, it surely poses more if extended to distinctions such as the present one— content-neutral distinctions (in effect, failures to restrict) in rules that are unrelated to the suppression of expression and that only incidentally affect First Amendment activity. Such an extension would mean strict scrutiny for all distinctions in any law subject to O’Brien analysis, an extraordinary expansion of judicial power.