When May the Government Require Groups to Endorse Certain Views in Order to Get Government Benefits?

That’s the question the Court considered in today’s Agency for Int’l Development v. Alliance for Open Society Int’l, Inc.; and the Court held that government’s power in this area is distinctly limited. Here’s the opening of Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion for six Justices (Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Thomas, dissented, and Justice Kagan was recused):

The United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003 (Leadership Act) outlined a comprehensive strategy to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS around the world. As part of that strategy, Congress authorized the appropriation of billions of dollars to fund efforts by nongovernmental organizations to assist in the fight.

The Act imposes two related conditions on that funding: First, no funds made available by the Act “may be used to promote or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution or sex trafficking.” And second, no funds may be used by an organization “that does not have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.” This case concerns the second of these conditions, referred to as the Policy Requirement. The question is whether that funding condition violates a recipient’s First Amendment rights….

The Policy Requirement mandates that recipients of Leadership Act funds explicitly agree with the Government’s policy to oppose prostitution and sex trafficking. It is, however, a basic First Amendment principle that “freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.” “At the heart of the First Amendment lies the principle that each person should decide for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence.” Were it enacted as a direct regulation of speech, the Policy Requirement would plainly violate the First Amendment. The question is whether the Government may nonetheless impose that requirement as a condition on the receipt of federal funds….

The court answers “no,” at least in this instance (and many others). Here’s the opening of an amicus brief that my Mayer Brown LLP colleagues and I filed on behalf of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the Christian Legal Society, which supports this result:

This case is about far more than prostitution and HIV/AIDS. The expansion of the modern regulatory state has increasingly led to financial involvement of the government with private organizations — including churches, religious universities, and religious charities — in ways that potentially give the government power over those organizations. Tax exemptions, which have been treated by this Court as tantamount to the provision of funds, are a prominent example. Student loans and grants, which are likewise treated as equivalent to direct payments to the university, are another. Numerous other examples exist, including the direct grants at issue here.

Under the government’s theory in this case, federal, state, and local governments may use these kinds of government funding programs as leverage to pressure organizations into affirmatively expressing particular government-prescribed views as the organizations’ own. For instance, if a government wants to pressure such groups to avow that they support or oppose contraception, pacifism, abortion, the death penalty, assisted suicide, or whatever other policy those then in control of the government choose, then that government would be free to do so.

For the reasons discussed below, that cannot be right. Such a “get with the program” power would let the government badly distort the marketplace of ideas by strengthening groups that toe the government line and financially crippling groups that refuse to say what the government demands. And such a power to coerce ideological conformity would unacceptably burden religious groups’ rights to speak or not speak in accordance with the truth as they see it. “[N]o official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” West Va. Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943). Likewise, no official should be permitted to acquire such a power by using the government’s vast resources as a tool for control of groups that participate in government programs.

Contrary to the government’s view, a government’s recognized power to limit speech within the programs that it funds cannot justify a power to compel speech as a condition of government funding. Government programs that limit what can be said within the programs typically leave participants ample alternative means of exercising their rights to speak as they see fit. The participants just have to engage in their preferred speech outside those programs.

But when the government compels an organization to say things — even if only through an affiliate — as a condition of participating in a program, then the organization cannot avoid saying those things. It thus has no alternative means of exercising its Free Speech Clause right not to speak while still participating in the program.

Moreover, once an organization is pressured to state a policy with which it does not agree, even through an affiliate, its ability to express contrary views outside the program will be undermined. Saying one thing in the program and the opposite outside will make the organization appear at best equivocal and at worst hypocritical. Thus, by compelling the endorsement of a government policy as a condition of accessing government-controlled funds, the government will have the power to effectively restrict the program participant’s speech even outside the government program — a power this Court’s cases have rightly rejected.

And I include below a lightly edited version of the entire decision:

Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the Court.

The United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act of 2003 (Leadership Act) outlined a comprehensive strategy to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS around the world. As part of that strategy, Congress authorized the appropriation of billions of dollars to fund efforts by nongovernmental organizations to assist in the fight.

The Act imposes two related conditions on that funding: First, no funds made available by the Act “may be used to promote or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution or sex trafficking.” And second, no funds may be used by an organization “that does not have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.” This case concerns the second of these conditions, referred to as the Policy Requirement. The question is whether that funding condition violates a recipient’s First Amendment rights….

The Policy Requirement mandates that recipients of Leadership Act funds explicitly agree with the Government’s policy to oppose prostitution and sex trafficking. It is, however, a basic First Amendment principle that “freedom of speech prohibits the government from telling people what they must say.” “At the heart of the First Amendment lies the principle that each person should decide for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence.” Were it enacted as a direct regulation of speech, the Policy Requirement would plainly violate the First Amendment. The question is whether the Government may nonetheless impose that requirement as a condition on the receipt of federal funds….

As a general matter, if a party objects to a condition on the receipt of federal funding, its recourse is to decline the funds. This remains true when the objection is that a condition may affect the recipient’s exercise of its First Amendment rights. See, e.g., United States v. American Library Assn., Inc. (plurality opinion) (rejecting a claim by public libraries that conditioning funds for Internet access on the libraries’ installing filtering software violated their First Amendment rights, explaining that “[t]o the extent that libraries wish to offer unfiltered access, they are free to do so without federal assistance”); Regan v. Taxation With Representation of Wash. (dismissing “the 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 Government “‘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.’” Rumsfeld v. FAIR. In some cases, a funding condition can result in an unconstitutional burden on First Amendment rights.

The dissent thinks that can only be true when the condition is not relevant to the objectives of the program (although it has its doubts about that), or when the condition is actually coercive, in the sense of an offer that cannot be refused. 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 program can always be manipulated to subsume the challenged 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.

A comparison of two cases helps illustrate the distinction: In Regan v. Taxation With Representation, the Court upheld a requirement that nonprofit organizations seeking tax-exempt status under 26 U.S.C. § 501(c)(3) not engage in substantial efforts to influence legislation. The tax-exempt status, we explained, “ha[d] much the same effect as a cash grant to the organization.” And by limiting § 501(c)(3) status to organizations that did not attempt to influence legislation, Congress had merely “chose[n] not to subsidize lobbying.” In rejecting the nonprofit’s First Amendment claim, the Court highlighted … the fact that the condition did not prohibit that organization from lobbying Congress altogether. By returning to a “dual structure” it had used in the past — separately incorporating as a § 501(c)(3) organization and § 501(c)(4) organization — the nonprofit could continue to claim § 501(c)(3) status for its nonlobbying activities, while attempting to influence legislation in its § 501(c)(4) capacity with separate funds. Maintaining such a structure, the Court noted, was not “unduly burdensome.” The condition thus did not deny the organization a government benefit “on account of its intention to lobby.”

In FCC v. League of Women Voters, by contrast, the Court struck down a condition on federal financial assistance to noncommercial broadcast television and radio stations that prohibited all editorializing, including with private funds. Even a station receiving only one percent of its overall budget from the Federal Government, the Court explained, was “barred absolutely from all editorializing.” Unlike the situation inRegan, the law provided no way for a station to limit its use of federal funds to noneditorializing activities, while using private funds “to make known its views on matters of public importance.” The prohibition thus went beyond ensuring that federal funds not be used to subsidize “public broadcasting station editorials,” and instead leveraged the federal funding to regulate the stations’ speech outside the scope of the program.

Our decision in Rust v. Sullivan elaborated on the approach reflected in Reganand League of Women Voters. In Rust, we considered Title X of the Public Health Service Act, a Spending Clause program that issued grants to nonprofit health-care organizations “to assist in the establishment and operation of voluntary family planning projects [to] offer a broad range of acceptable and effective family planning methods and services.” The organizations received funds from a variety of sources other than the Federal Government for a variety of purposes. The Act, however, prohibited the Title X federal funds from being “used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning.” To enforce this provision, HHS regulations barred Title X projects from advocating abortion as a method of family planning, and required grantees to ensure that their Title X projects were “‘physically and financially separate’” from their other projects that engaged in the prohibited activities. A group of Title X funding recipients brought suit, claiming the regulations imposed an unconstitutional condition on their First Amendment rights. We rejected their claim.

We explained that Congress can, without offending the Constitution, selectively fund certain programs to address an issue of public concern, without funding alternative ways of addressing the same problem. In Title X, Congress had defined the federal program to encourage only particular family planning methods. The challenged regulations were simply “designed to ensure that the limits of the federal program are observed,” and “that public funds [are] spent for the purposes for which they were authorized.”

In making this determination, the Court stressed that “Title X expressly distinguishes between a Title X grantee and a Title X project.” The regulations governed only the scope of the grantee’s Title X projects, leaving it “unfettered in its other activities.” “The Title X grantee can continue to … engage in abortion advocacy; it simply is required to conduct those activities through programs that are separate and independent from the project that receives Title X funds.” Because the regulations did not “prohibit[ ] the recipient from engaging in the protected conduct outside the scope of the federally funded program,” they did not run afoul of the First Amendment….

[T]he Leadership Act has two conditions relevant here. The first — unchallenged in this litigation — prohibits Leadership Act funds from being used “to promote or advocate the legalization or practice of prostitution or sex trafficking.” The Government concedes that [this provision] by itself ensures that federal funds will not be used for the prohibited purposes.

The Policy Requirement therefore must be doing something more — and it is. The dissent views the Requirement as simply a selection criterion by which the Government identifies organizations “who believe in its ideas to carry them to fruition.” As an initial matter, whatever purpose the Policy Requirement serves in selecting funding recipients, its effects go beyond selection. The Policy Requirement is an ongoing condition on recipients’ speech and activities, a ground for terminating a grant after selection is complete. In any event, as the Government acknowledges, it is not simply seeking organizations that oppose prostitution. Rather, it explains, “Congress has expressed its purpose ‘to eradicate’ prostitution and sex trafficking, and it wants recipients to adopt a similar stance” (emphasis added). This case is not about the Government’s ability to enlist the assistance of those with whom it already agrees. It is about compelling a grant recipient to adopt a particular belief as a condition of funding.

By demanding that funding recipients adopt — as their own — the Government’s view on an issue of public concern, the condition by its very nature affects “protected conduct outside the scope of the federally funded program.” Rust. A recipient cannot avow the belief dictated by the Policy Requirement when spending Leadership Act funds, and then turn around and assert a contrary belief, or claim neutrality, when participating in activities on its own time and dime. By requiring recipients to profess a specific belief, the Policy Requirement goes beyond defining the limits of the federally funded program to defining the recipient. See ibid. (“our ‘unconstitutional conditions’ cases involve situations in which the Government has placed a condition on the recipient of the subsidy rather than on a particular program or service, thus effectively prohibiting the recipient from engaging in the protected conduct outside the scope of the federally funded program”).

The Government contends that the affiliate guidelines, established while this litigation was pending, save the program. Under those guidelines, funding recipients are permitted to work with affiliated organizations that do not abide by the condition, as long as the recipients retain “objective integrity and independence” from the unfettered affiliates. The Government suggests the guidelines alleviate any unconstitutional burden on the respondents’ First Amendment rights by allowing them to either: (1) accept Leadership Act funding and comply with Policy Requirement, but establish affiliates to communicate contrary views on prostitution; or (2) decline funding themselves (thus remaining free to express their own views or remain neutral), while creating affiliates whose sole purpose is to receive and administer Leadership Act funds, thereby “cabin[ing] the effects” of the Policy Requirement within the scope of the federal program.

Neither approach is sufficient. When we have noted the importance of affiliates in this context, it has been because they allow an organization bound by a funding condition to exercise its First Amendment rights outside the scope of the federal program. Affiliates cannot serve that purpose when the condition is that a funding recipient espouse a specific belief as its own. If the affiliate is distinct from the recipient, the arrangement does not afford a means for the recipient to express its beliefs. If the affiliate is more clearly identified with the recipient, the recipient can express those beliefs only at the price of evident hypocrisy. The guidelines themselves make that clear. See 45 CFR § 89.3 (allowing funding recipients to work with affiliates whose conduct is “inconsistent with the recipient’s opposition to the practices of prostitution and sex trafficking” (emphasis added)).

The Government suggests that the Policy Requirement is necessary because, without it, the grant of federal funds could free a recipient’s private funds “to be used to promote prostitution or sex trafficking.” That argument assumes that federal funding will simply supplant private funding, rather than pay for new programs or expand existing ones. The Government offers no support for that assumption as a general matter, or any reason to believe it is true here. And if the Government’s argument were correct, League of Women Voters would have come out differently, and much of the reasoning of Regan and Rust would have been beside the point.

The Government cites but one case to support that argument, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. That case concerned the quite different context of a ban on providing material support to terrorist organizations, where the record indicated that support for those organizations’ nonviolent operations was funneled to support their violent activities….

[T]he Policy Requirement goes beyond preventing recipients from using private funds in a way that would undermine the federal program. It requires them to pledge allegiance to the Government’s policy of eradicating prostitution. As to that, we cannot improve upon what Justice Jackson wrote for the Court 70 years ago: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.” West Va. Bd. of Ed. v. Barnette.

Justice Scalia, with whom Justice Thomas joins, dissenting….

[The] Policy Requirement is nothing more than a means of selecting suitable agents to implement the Government’s chosen strategy to eradicate HIV/AIDS. That is perfectly permissible under the Constitution.

The First Amendment does not mandate a viewpoint-neutral government. Government must choose between rival ideas and adopt some as its own: competition over cartels, solar energy over coal, weapon development over disarmament, and so forth. Moreover, the government may enlist the assistance of those who believe in its ideas to carry them to fruition; and it need not enlist for that purpose those who oppose or do not support the ideas.

That seems to me a matter of the most common common sense. For example: One of the purposes of America’s foreign-aid programs is the fostering of good will towards this country. If the organization Hamas — reputed to have an efficient system for delivering welfare — were excluded from a program for the distribution of U.S. food assistance, no one could reasonably object. And that would remain true if Hamas were an organization of United States citizens entitled to the protection of the Constitution. So long as the unfunded organization remains free to engage in its activities (including anti-American propaganda) “without federal assistance,” refusing to make use of its assistance for an enterprise to which it is opposed does not abridge its speech.

And the same is true when the rejected organization is not affirmatively opposed to, but merely unsupportive of, the object of the federal program, which appears to be the case here. (Respondents do not promote prostitution, but neither do they wish to oppose it.) A federal program to encourage healthy eating habits need not be administered by the American Gourmet Society, which has nothing against healthy food but does not insist upon it.

The argument is that this commonsense principle will enable the government to discriminate against, and injure, points of view to which it is opposed. Of course the Constitution does not prohibit government spending that discriminates against, and injures, points of view to which the government is opposed; every government program which takes a position on a controversial issue does that. Anti-smoking programs injure cigar aficionados, programs encouraging sexual abstinence injure free-love advocates, etc.

The constitutional prohibition at issue here is not a prohibition against discriminating against or injuring opposing points of view, but the First Amendment’s prohibition against the coercing of speech. I am frankly dubious that a condition for eligibility to participate in a minor federal program such as this one runs afoul of that prohibition even when the condition is irrelevant to the goals of the program. Not every disadvantage is a coercion.

But that is not the issue before us here. Here the views that the Government demands an applicant forswear — or that the Government insists an applicant favor — are relevant to the program in question. The program is valid only if the Government is entitled to disfavor the opposing view (here, advocacy of or toleration of prostitution). And if the program can disfavor it, so can the selection of those who are to administer the program.

There is no risk that this principle will enable the Government to discriminate arbitrarily against positions it disfavors. It would not, for example, permit the Government to exclude from bidding on defense contracts anyone who refuses to abjure prostitution. But here a central part of the Government’s HIV/AIDS strategy is the suppression of prostitution, by which HIV is transmitted. It is entirely reasonable to admit to participation in the program only those who believe in that goal.

According to the Court, however, this transgresses a constitutional line between conditions that operate inside a spending program and those that control speec houtside of it. I am at a loss to explain what this central pillar of the Court’s opinion — this distinction that the Court itself admits is “hardly clear” … — has to do with the First Amendment.

The distinction was alluded to, to be sure, in Rust v. Sullivan, but not as (what the Court now makes it) an invariable requirement for First Amendment validity. That the pro-abortion speech prohibition was limited to “inside the program” speech was relevant in Rust because the program itself was not an anti-abortion program. The Government remained neutral on that controversial issue, but did not wish abortion to be promoted within its family-planning-services program. The statutory objective could not be impaired, in other words, by “outside the program” pro-abortion speech. The purpose of the limitation was to prevent Government funding from providing the means of pro-abortion propaganda, which the Government did not wish (and had no constitutional obligation) to provide.

The situation here is vastly different. Elimination of prostitution is an objective of the HIV/AIDS program, and any promotion of prostitution — whether made inside or outside the program — does harm the program.

Of course the most obvious manner in which the admission to a program of an ideological opponent can frustrate the purpose of the program is by freeing up the opponent’s funds for use in its ideological opposition. To use the Hamas example again: Subsidizing that organization’s provision of social services enables the money that it would otherwise use for that purpose to be used, instead, for anti-American propaganda.

Perhaps that problem does not exist in this case since the respondents do not affirmatively promote prostitution. But the Court’s analysis categorically rejects that justification for ideological requirements in all cases, demanding “record indica[tion]” that “federal funding will simply supplant private funding, rather than pay for new programs.” This seems to me quite naive. Money is fungible. The economic reality is that when NGOs can conduct their AIDS work on the Government’s dime, they can expend greater resources on policies that undercut the Leadership Act.

The Government need not establish by record evidence that this will happen. To make it a valid consideration in determining participation in federal programs, it suffices that this is a real and obvious risk.

None of the cases the Court cites for its holding provide support. I have already discussed Rust. As for Taxation With Representation, … the fact that [certain] nonprofits were permitted to use a separate § 501(c)(4) affiliate for their lobbying … was entirely nonessential to the Court’s holding…. As for League of Women Voters, the ban on editorializing at issue there was disallowed precisely because it did not further a relevant, permissible policy of the Federal Communications Act — and indeed was simply incompatible with the Act’s “affirmativ[e] encourage[ment]” of the “vigorous expression of controversial opinions” by licensed broadcasters….

Ideological-commitment requirements such as the one here are quite rare; but making the choice between competing applicants on relevant ideological grounds is undoubtedly quite common. See, e.g., Finley. As far as the Constitution is concerned, it is quite impossible to distinguish between the two. If the government cannot demand a relevant ideological commitment as a condition of application, neither can it distinguish between applicants on a relevant ideological ground. And that is the real evil of today’s opinion. One can expect, in the future, frequent challenges to the denial of government funding for relevant ideological reasons….

What Congress has done here — requiring an ideological commitment relevant to the Government task at hand — is approved by the Constitution itself. Americans need not support the Constitution; they may be Communists or anarchists. But “[t]he Senators and Representatives …, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support [the] Constitution.” The Framers saw the wisdom of imposing affirmative ideological commitments prerequisite to assisting in the government’s work. And so should we.

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