prenatal care. The Court majority that upheld these regulations was, with
the exception of Justice Byron White, appointed by the Presidents under
whose administrations the regulations were formulated.

The First Amendment concerns aroused by Rust went beyond the area
of abortion. These fears were substantiated when the Bush administration's
Justice Department relied on Rust to argue that government officials have
unlimited discretion to dictate the content of publicly funded art. In 1991,
after a Democratic Congress passed legislation removing the abortion gag
order from federally funded clinics, President George Bush vetoed the bill.
But on November 3, 1992, a federal appeals court in Washington blocked
the enforcement of the policy, saying that the Bush administration had
failed to seek public comment on it. Finally, in January 1993, on the anni-
versary of the Roe v. Wade decision, President Clinton issued an order
rescinding the ban on abortion counseling and four other policies from the
Reagan and Bush administrations that discouraged abortions. Family plan-
ners and First Amendment groups hailed the action as the end of a five-year
effort by federal authorities to censor information offered to low-income
clients. The 1995 Contract with America propounded by the new Republi-
can Congress promised to restore the abortion gag order, but the closest the
Republicans have come to fulfilling that promise was the inclusion of a
provision in the 1996 Telecommunications Act that would prohibit the use
of the Internet to communicate information about abortion.

In the meantime, the increasingly violent antiabortion protests around
the country raised public and political concern. Between 1985 and 1994,
there were almost five hundred attempts to physically block access to
abortion clinics, resulting in more than one thousand violent incidents,
including the 1993 murder of a doctor outside a Florida clinic. This pattern
of organized, violent protest soon produced judicial and legislative initia-
tives that challenged the First Amendment rights of the antiabortion pro-
testers. The National Organization for Women (NOW) attempted to sue the
more extreme protest groups under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt
Organizations Act ( RICO). The case, National Organization for Women v.
Scheidler, was dismissed in federal court and by the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Seventh Circuit on the grounds that "non-economic" crimes were
outside the bounds of RICO. NOW appealed to the Supreme Court, and in
January 1994 the Court unanimously ruled that RICO could be used against
protesters who conspired to shut down abortion clinics. Writing for the
Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist did not address the First Amend-
ment claims of Scheidler, but Justice David Souter, who wrote a concurring
opinion, stressed that the Court was not barring First Amendment chal-
lenges to RICO's use in particular cases. "I think it prudent to notice that
RICO actions could deter protected advocacy and to caution courts apply-
ing RICO to bear in mind the First Amendment interests that could be at
stake," concluded Souter, joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy.

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