A First Amendment issue?

The Supreme Court granted certiorari to review a Third Circuit decision that invalidated the "Solomon Amendment". The AP story linked in the title hereto describes the Solomon Amendment as "a 1994 federal law requiring law schools to give the military full access or else lose their funding." That description is lacking.

The full text of the Solomon Amendment is here. The title of the enactment describes its purpose: "Institutions of higher education that prevent ROTC access or military recruiting on campus: denial of grants and contracts from Department of Defense, Department of Education, and certain other departments and agencies." In other words, institutions of higher learning that prevent military recruiting on campus can be denied grants and contracts from the DoD, DoE and other federal agencies.

The law schools challenging the Solomon Amendment claim that it interferes with their First Amendment rights. This is a very poor argument. The law schools are free to choose: accept federal money with the conditions attached (a practice that the Supreme Court upheld 20 years ago when linking highway funding state enactments of a 21-years-old drinking age) or forego the cash while barring military recruiters over the military's ban on homosexuals (which is what this is really about).

The Third Circuit opinion likened the schools to the Boy Scouts, who the Supreme Court had said cannot be forced to accept homosexual scout leaders. This is slipshod reasoning: The Solomon Amendment does not prevent schools from barring military recruiters or ROTC programs; instead, it just says that the schools that choose that policy may not receive certain Federal funding. In other words, the Third Circuit's ruling enshrined a right to receive Federal funds. That's garbage and hopefully the Supreme Court will put this to rights.