Wednesday, July 17, 2019

RIP John Paul Stevens

Money is property; it is not speech.  Speech has the power to inspire volunteers to perform a multitude of tasks on a campaign trail, on a battleground, or even on a football field.  Money, meanwhile, has the power to pay hired laborers to perform the same tasks.  It does not follow, however, that the First Amendment provides the same measure of protection to the use of money to accomplish such goals as it provides to the use of ideas to achieve the same results.

-- Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (20 April 1920 - 16 July 2019), American lawyer and judge who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1975 until his retirement in 2010, concurring in Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, 528 U.S. 377 (2000)

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