Cite as: 528 U. S. 377 (2000)
Breyer, J., concurring
erty" or as "deprivations of property," see, e. g., Moore v. East Cleveland, 431 U. S. 494, 513 (1977) (Stevens, J., concurring in judgment). Telling a grandmother that she may not use her own property to provide shelter to a grand-child—or to hire mercenaries to work in that grandchild's campaign for public office—raises important constitutional concerns that are unrelated to the First Amendment. Because I did not participate in the Court's decision in Buckley, I did not have the opportunity to suggest then that those property and liberty concerns adequately explain the Court's decision to invalidate the expenditure limitations in the 1974 Act.
Reliance on the First Amendment to justify the invalidation of campaign finance regulations is the functional equivalent of the Court's candid reliance on the doctrine of substantive due process as articulated in the two prevailing opinions in Moore v. East Cleveland. The right to use one's own money to hire gladiators, or to fund "speech by proxy," certainly merits significant constitutional protection. These property rights, however, are not entitled to the same protection as the right to say what one pleases.
Justice Breyer, with whom Justice Ginsburg joins, concurring.
The dissenters accuse the Court of weakening the First Amendment. They believe that failing to adopt a "strict scrutiny" standard "balance[s] away First Amendment freedoms." Post, at 410 (opinion of Thomas, J.). But the principal dissent oversimplifies the problem faced in the campaign finance context. It takes a difficult constitutional problem and turns it into a lopsided dispute between political expression and government censorship. Under the cover of this fiction and its accompanying formula, the dissent would make the Court absolute arbiter of a difficult question best left, in the main, to the political branches. I write sepa-
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