Court Opinion

ID: 9429726
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:27:44.623119+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:21.059275
License: Public Domain

Justice Rehnquist,
with whom The Chief Justice and Justice White join, dissenting.
All but three paragraphs of the Court’s lengthy opinion in this case are devoted to the development of a scenario in which the Government appears as the “Big Bad Wolf,” and appellee Pacifica as “Little Red Riding Hood.” In the Court’s scenario the Big Bad Wolf cruelly forbids Little Red *403Riding Hood to take to her grandmother some of the food that she is carrying in her basket. Only three paragraphs are used to delineate a truer picture of the litigants, wherein it appears that some of the food in the basket was given to Little Red Riding Hood by the Big Bad Wolf himself, and that the Big Bad Wolf had told Little Red Riding Hood in advance that if she accepted his food she would have to abide by his conditions. Congress in' enacting § 399 of the Public Broadcasting Act, 47 U. S. C. § 399, has simply determined that public funds shall not be used to subsidize noncommercial, educational broadcasting stations which engage in “editorializing” or which support or oppose any political candidate. I do not believe that anything in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prevents Congress from choosing to spend public moneys in that manner. Perhaps a more appropriate analogy than that of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf is that of Faust and Mephistopheles; Pacifica, well aware of § 399’s condition on its receipt of public money, nonetheless accepted the public money and now seeks to avoid the conditions which Congress legitimately has attached to receipt of that funding.
While noncommercial, educational broadcasting has a long history in this country, its success was spotty at best until the Federal Government came to its assistance some 45 years ago. Beginning in the late 1930’s, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reserved certain frequencies, first for educational radio, 47 CFR §§4.131-4.133 (1939), and then for educational television, Television Assignments, 41 F. C. C. 148 (1952). But even with that assistance, by 1962 there were only 50 educational television stations on the air, and two-thirds of the population had no access to educational television. S. Rep. No. 67, 87th Cong., 1st Sess., 3 (1961). In that year Congress passed the Educational Television Act of 1962, Pub. L. 87-447, 76 Stat. 64, which appropriated $32 million over a period of five years to aid the construction of educational stations, and by 1967, 126 such stations were operating.
*404Congress’ vision was that public broadcasting would be a forum for the educational, cultural, and public affairs broadcasting which commercial stations had been unable or unwilling to furnish. In order to further that vision, in 1967 Congress passed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, Pub. L. 90-129, 81 Stat. 365, 47 U. S. C. §390 et seq., of which §399 is a part, which created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a nonprofit, Government-chartered corporation governed by a Board of Directors appointed by the President. Although Congress could have chosen to create a federally owned broadcasting network, instead it chose a Government funding program whereby CPB would make grants to stations owned by others, fund the production of programs, and assist in the establishment and development of interconnection systems.
Congress’ intent was that CPB’s subsidies would ensure that “programs of high quality, diversity, creativity, excellence, and innovation, which are obtained from diverse sources, will be made available to public telecommunications entities, with strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” 47 U. S. C. § 396(g)(1)(A). Understandably Congress did not leave its creature CPB free to roam at large in the broadcasting world, but instead imposed certain restrictions, in keeping with Congress’ purposes in passing the Act, on CPB’s authorization to grant funds. For example, Congress required that stations receiving CPB grants be government entities or nonprofit organizations, 47 U. S. C. §§397(6), (7), and it prohibited them from selling air time for any purpose whatever — including selling time for political or public affairs presentations. §§397(7), 399a; see 47 CFR §§ 73.503(d), 73.621(e) (1983). Furthermore, in order to prevent recipient stations from serving as outlets for the political and ideological views of station owners and managers, Congress also insisted in § 399 that subsidized educational stations not engage in editorializing or endorsing or opposing political candidates.
*405The Court’s three-paragraph discussion of why § 399, repeatedly reexamined and retained by Congress, violates the First Amendment is to me utterly unpersuasive. Congress has rationally determined that the bulk of the taxpayers whose moneys provide the funds for grants by the CPB would prefer not to see the management of local educational stations promulgate its own private views on the air at taxpayer expense. Accordingly Congress simply has decided not to subsidize stations which engage in that activity.
Last Term, in Regan v. Taxation With Representation of Washington, 461 U. S. 540 (1983), we upheld a provision of the Internal Revenue Code which deprives an otherwise eligible organization of its tax-exempt status and its right to receive tax-deductible contributions if it engages in lobbying. We squarely rejected the contention that Congress’ decision not to subsidize lobbying violates the First Amendment, even though we recognized that the right to lobby is constitutionally protected. In so holding we reiterated that “a legislature’s decision not to subsidize the exercise of a fundamental right does not infringe the right.” Id., at 549. We also rejected the notion that, because Congress chooses to subsidize some speech but not other speech, its exercise of its spending powers is subject to strict judicial scrutiny. Id., at 547-548.
Relying primarily on the reasoning of the concurrence rather than of the majority opinion in Taxation with Representation, the Court today seeks to avoid the thrust of that opinion by pointing out that a public broadcasting station is barred from editorializing with its nonfederal funds even though it may receive only a minor fraction of its income from CPB grants. The Court reasons that § 399 does not operate simply to restrict the use of federal funds to purposes defined by Congress; instead, it goes further by prohibiting any station that receives “only 1% of its overall income from CPB grants” from using “even wholly private funds to finance its editorial activity.” Ante, at 400.
*406But to me there is no distinction between §399 and the statute which we upheld in Oklahoma v. CSC, 330 U. S. 127 (1947). Section 12(a) of the Hatch Act totally prohibits any local or state employee who is employed in any activity which receives partial or total financing from the United States from taking part in any political activities. One might just as readily denounce such congressional action as prohibiting employees of a state or local government receiving even a minor fraction of that government's income from federal assistance from exercising their First Amendment right to speak. But not surprisingly this Court upheld the Hatch Act provision in Oklahoma v. CSC, supra, succinctly stating:
“While the United States is not concerned with, and has no power to regulate, local political activities as such of state officials, it does have power to fix the terms upon which its money allotments to states shall be disbursed.” Id., at 143.*
See also CSC v. Letter Carriers, 413 U. S. 548 (1973); United Public Workers v. Mitchell, 330 U. S. 75 (1947) (rejecting a First Amendment attack on the Hatch Act provisions applicable to federal employees).
The Court seems to believe that Congress actually subsidizes editorializing only if a station uses federal money specifically to cover the expenses that the Court believes can be isolated as editorializing expenses. But to me the Court's approach ignores economic reality. CPB’s unrestricted grants are used for salaries, training, equipment, promotion, etc. — financial expenditures which benefit all aspects of a station’s programming, including management’s editorials. *407Given the impossibility of compartmentalizing programming expenses in any meaningful way, it seems clear to me that the only effective means for preventing the use of public moneys to subsidize the airing of management’s views is for Congress to ban a subsidized station from all on-the-air editorializing. Under the Court’s view, if Congress decided to withhold a 100% subsidy from a station which editorializes, that decision would be constitutional under the principle affirmed in our Taxation With Representation decision. Surely on these facts, the distinction between the Government’s power to withhold a 100% subsidy, on the one hand, and the 20-30% subsidy involved here, 547 F. Supp. 379, 385 (CD Cal. 1982), on the other hand, is simply trivialization.
This is not to say that the Government may attach any condition to its largess; it is only to say that when the Government is simply exercising its power to allocate its own public funds, we need only find that the condition imposed has a rational relationship to Congress’ purpose in providing the subsidy and that it is not primarily “‘“aimed at the suppression of dangerous ideas.’”” Cammarano v. United States, 358 U. S. 498, 513 (1959), quoting Speiser v. Randall, 357 U. S. 513, 519 (1958), in turn quoting American Communications Assn. v. Douds, 339 U. S. 382, 402 (1950). In this case Congress’ prohibition is directly related to its purpose in providing subsidies for public broadcasting, and it is plainly rational for Congress to have determined that taxpayer moneys should not be used to subsidize management’s views or to pay for management’s exercise of partisan politics. Indeed, it is entirely rational for Congress to have wished to avoid the appearance of Government sponsorship of a particular view or a particular political candidate. Furthermore, Congress’ prohibition is strictly neutral. In no sense can it be said that Congress has prohibited only editorial views of one particular ideological bent. Nor has it prevented public stations from airing programs, documentaries, interviews, etc. dealing with controversial subjects, so long as manage*408ment itself does not expressly endorse a particular viewpoint. And Congress has not prevented station management from communicating its own views on those subjects through any medium other than subsidized public broadcasting.
For the foregoing reasons I find this case entirely different from the so-called “unconstitutional condition” cases, wherein the Court has stated that the government “may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected interests — especially his interest in freedom of speech.” Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U. S. 593, 597 (1972). In those cases the suppressed speech was not content-neutral in the same sense as here, and in those cases, there is at best only a strained argument that the legislative purpose of the condition imposed was to avoid subsidizing the prohibited speech. Speiser v. Randall, supra, is illustrative of the difference. In that case California’s decision to deny its property tax exemption to veterans who would not declare that they would not work to overthrow the government was plainly directed at suppressing what California regarded as speech of a dangerous content. And the condition imposed was so unrelated to the benefit to be conferred that it is difficult to argue that California’s property tax exemption actually subsidized the dangerous speech.
Here, in my view, Congress has rationally concluded that the bulk of taxpayers whose moneys provide the funds for grants by the CPB would prefer not to see the management of public stations engage in editorializing or the endorsing or opposing of political candidates. Because Congress’ decision to enact §399 is a rational exercise of its spending powers and strictly neutral, I would hold that nothing in the First Amendment makes it unconstitutional. Accordingly, I would reverse the judgment of the District Court.

The Court takes pains to show that the argument rejected in Oklahoma v. CSC was a Tenth Amendment argument. Ante, at 401-402, n. 27. Without belaboring the point, in my view a fair reading of the opinion is that the Court used the quoted language in that case to refer to a First Amendment argument similar to this one, as well as to a Tenth Amendment argument.