actually, you've dropped right into the bigger problem - competing precedents. Commerce Clause DOES trump first-amendment freedoms in many other ways, enforced by a significant number of other precedents (including those that give the feds the rights over the states in issues of drug laws and assisted suicide laws), and the decision (as far as I've read, and any legal decision is a mess to read) looked at too much at the issue of what the money was going to not at all on how it got there.

Speech may be speech, but commerce is still commerce. The money as "speech" is going to bite the conservatives a lot more than they might like over time.

the other BIG problem with the whole damn thing is that most of the issues discussed in the decision (according to several reviewers) were not actually part of the findings of facts or in the original arguments presented in the case before them - this seems to be one of the worst cases of "judicial activism" I've ever seen.

This also was coming from the very same Roberts and Alito who insist in their writings (and Roberts reiterated in his hearings) that they are always in favor of strictly limited decisions, as shown by how much they refuse to address any real significant constitutional issue in any church-state establishment problem, constantly leaving the lower courts with a mess of vague and competing opinions and school boards with an utterly insane inability to act correctly, and thus more decisions to make it up there.