Court Opinion

ID: 9427770
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:21:51.043299+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:09.594873
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rehnquist,
dissenting.
The Court holds that Art. Ill of the Schaumburg Village Code is unconstitutional as applied to prohibit respondent Citizens for a Better Environment (CBE) from soliciting contributions door to door.' If read in isolation, today’s decision might be defensible. When combined with this Court’s earlier pronouncements on the subject, however, today’s decision relegates any local government interested in regulating door-to-door activities to the role of Sisyphus.
The Court’s opinion first recites the litany of language from 40 years of decisions in which this Court has considered various *640restrictions on the right to distribute information or solicit door to door, concluding from these decisions that “charitable appeals for funds, on the street or door to door, involve a variety of speech interests . . . that are within the protection of the First Amendment.” Ante, at 632. I would have thought this proposition self-evident now that this Court has swept even the most banal commercial speech within the ambit of the First Amendment. See Virginia Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, 425 U. S. 748 (1976). But, having arrived at this conclusion on the basis of earlier cases, the Court effectively departs from the reasoning of those cases in discussing the limits on Schaumburg’s authority to place limitations on so-called “charitable” solicitors who go from house to house in the village.
The Court’s neglect of its prior precedents in this regard is entirely understandable, since the earlier decisions striking down various regulations covering door-to-door activities turned upon factors not present in the instant case. A plurality of these decisions turned primarily, if not exclusively, upon the amount of discretion vested in municipal authorities to grant or deny permits on the basis of vague or even nonexistent criteria. See Schneider v. State, 308 U. S. 147, 163-164 (1939); Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U. S. 296, 305-306 (1940); Largent v. Texas, 318 U. S. 418, 422 (1943); Hynes v. Mayor of Oradell, 425 U. S. 610, 620-621 (1976). In Schneider, for example, the Court invalidated such an ordinance as applied to Jehovah’s Witnesses because “in the end, [the applicant’s] liberty to communicate with the residents of the town at their homes depends upon the exercise of the officer’s discretion.” 308 U. S., at 164. These cases clearly do not control the validity of Schaumburg’s ordinance, which leaves virtually no discretion in the hands of the licensing authority.
Another line of earlier cases involved the distribution of information, as opposed to requests for contributions. Martin v. Struthers, 319 U. S. 141 (1943), for example, dealt with *641Jehovah’s Witnesses who had gone door to door with invitations to a religious meeting despite a local ordinance prohibiting distribution of any “handbills, circulars or other advertisements” door to door. The Court noted that such an ordinance “limits the dissemination of knowledge,” and that it could “serve no purpose but that forbidden by the Constitution, the naked restriction of the dissemination of ideas.” Id., at 144, 147.
Here, however, the challenged ordinance deals not with the dissemination of ideas, but rather with the solicitation of money. That the Martin Court would have found this distinction important is apparent not only from Martin’s emphasis on the dissemination of knowledge, but also from various other decisions of the same period. In Breard v. Alexandria, 341 U. S. 622 (1951), for example, the Court upheld an ordinance prohibiting “solicitors, peddlers, hawkers, itinerant merchants, or transient vendors of merchandise” from entering private property without permission. The petitioner in Breará had been going door to door soliciting subscriptions for magazines. Despite petitioner’s invocation of both freedom of speech and freedom of the press, the Court distinguished the “commercial feature” of the transactions from their informational overtone. See id., at 642. Because Martin “was narrowly limited to the precise fact of the free distribution of an invitation to religious services,” the Court found that it was “not necessarily inconsistent with the conclusion reached in this case.” 341 U. S., at 643.
Shunning the guidance of these cases, the Court sets out to define a new category of solicitors who may not be subjected to regulation. According to the Court, Schaumburg cannot prohibit door-to-door solicitation for contributions by “organizations whose primary purpose is ... to gather and disseminate information about and advocate positions on matters of public concern.” Ante, at 635. In another portion of its opinion, the majority redefines this immunity as extending to all *642organizations “primarily engaged in research, advocacy, or public education and that use their own paid staff to carry out these functions as well as to solicit financial support.” Ante, at 636-637. This result — or perhaps, more accurately, these results — seem unwarranted by the First and Fourteenth Amendments for three reasons.
First, from a legal standpoint, the Court invites municipalities to draw a line it has already erased. Today’s opinion strongly, and I believe correctly, implies that the result here would be otherwise if CBE’s primary objective were to provide “information about the characteristics and costs of goods and services,” ante, at .632, rather than to “advocate positions on matters of public concern.” Ante, at 635. Four years ago, however, the Court relied upon the supposed bankruptcy of this very distinction in overturning a prohibition on advertising by pharmacists. See Virginia Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, supra. According to Virginia Pharmacy, while “not all commercial messages contain the same or even a very great public interest element[,] [tlhere are few to which such an element . . . could not be added.” 425 U. S., at 764. This and other considerations led the Court in that case to conclude that “no line between publicly ‘interesting’ or ‘important’ commercial advertising and the opposite kind could ever be drawn.” Id., at 765. To the extent that the Court found such a line elusive in Virginia Pharmacy, I venture to suggest that the Court, as well as local legislators, will find the line equally elusive in the context of door-to-door solicitation.
Second, from a practical standpoint, the Court gives absolutely no guidance as to how a municipality might identify those organizations “whose primary purpose is ... to gather and disseminate information about and advocate positions on matters of public concern,” and which are therefore exempt from Art. III. Earlier cases do provide one guideline: the municipality must rely on objective criteria, since reliance *643upon official discretion in any significant degree would clearly run afoul of Schneider, Cantwell, Largent, and Hynes.1 In requiring municipal authorities to use “more precise measures to separate” constitutionally preferred organizations from their less preferred counterparts, ante, at 637, the Court would do well to remember that these local bodies are poorly equipped to investigate and audit the various persons and organizations that will apply to them for preferred status. Stripped of discretion, they must be able to resort to a line-drawing test capable of easy and reliable application without the necessity for an exhaustive case-by-case investigation of each applicant.2
*644Finally, I believe that the Court overestimates the value, in a constitutional sense, of door-to-door solicitation for financial contributions and simultaneously underestimates the reasons why a village board might conclude that regulation of such activity was necessary. In Hynes v. Mayor of Oradell, this Court referred with approval to Professor Zechariah Chafee’s observation that “[o]f all the methods of spreading unpopular ideas, [house-to-house convassing] seems the least entitled to extensive protection.” 425 U. S., at 619, quoting Z. Chafee, Free Speech in the United States 406 (1954). While such activity may be worthy of heightened protection when limited to the dissemination of information, see, e. g., Martin v. Struthers, 319 U. S. 141 (1943), or when designed to propagate religious beliefs, see, e. g., Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U. S. 296 (1940), I believe that a simple request for money lies far from the core protections of the First Amendment as heretofore interpreted. In the case of such solicitation, the community’s interest in insuring that the collecting organization meet some objective financial criteria is indisputably valid. Regardless of whether one labels non-charitable solicitation “fraudulent,” nothing in the United States Constitution should prevent residents of a community from making the collective judgment that certain worthy charities may solicit door to door while at the same time insulating themselves against panhandlers, profiteers, and peddlers.
The central weakness of the Court’s decision, I believe, is its failure to recognize, let alone confront, the two most important issues in this case: how does one define a “charitable” organization, and to which authority in our federal system is application of that definition confided? I would uphold Schaumburg’s ordinance as applied to CBE because that ordi*645nance, while perhaps too strict to suit some tastes, affects only door-to-door solicitation for financial contributions, leaves little or no discretion in the hands of municipal authorities to “censor” unpopular speech, and is rationally related to the community’s collective desire to bestow its largess upon organizations that are truly “charitable.” I therefore dissent.

 In this regard, I find somewhat surprising the Court’s reference to the ordinance considered in National Foundation v. Fort Worth, 415 F. 2d 41 (CA5 1969), cert. denied, 396 U. S. 1040 (1970), as if it were an improvement .on Schaumburg’s ordinance. See ante, at 635, n. 9. Fort Worth requires solicitors to demonstrate that the cost of soliciting will not exceed 20 percent of the amount expected to be raised. The Court finds appeal, however, in the ability of Fort Worth’s officials to waive that requirement if the applicant can show that the costs of solicitation are “not unreasonable.” See 415 F. 2d, at 44, n. 2. Given the potential for abuse of this open-ended grant of discretion, I would think that Fort Worth’s ordinance would be more, not less, suspect than Schaumburg’s.

 The Court implies that an organization’s eligibility for tax-exempt status under state or federal law could determine its eligibility for preferred constitutional status in its fundraising efforts. See ante, at 637, n. 10. Such a rule, although superficially appealing, suffers from serious drawbacks. The availability of such exemptions and deductions is a matter of legislative grace, not constitutional privilege. See Commissioner v. Sullivan, 356 U. S. 27, 28 (1958). See also Lewyt Corp. v. Commissioner, 349 U. S. 237, 240 (1955). Indeed, prior to the Tax Reform Act of 1976, a federal exemption was not available to any organization that devoted a “substantial part” of its activities to attempts “to influence legislation.” See 26 U. S. C. § 501 (c) (3), as amended by Pub. L. 94-455, 90 Stat. 1727. See also 1976 U. S. Code Cong. & Admin. News 2897, 4104r-4109. Even today there are strict limitations on the amount a tax-exempt organization can spend on such activities. See 26 U. S. C. § 501 (h). Nevertheless, I imagine that the lobbying activities previously excluded from, and now closely regulated by, § 501 would lie close to the core of those activities that the Court seeks to protect. For this reason, I cannot believe that *644the Court bases CBE’s First Amendment protection on such sandy soil. Yet it gives no indication what other objectively verifiable characteristics might render an organization eligible for preferred status under the First Amendment.