I appreciated Lawrence Tribe’s op-ed on Justice Scalia (“The unrelenting provoker,” Feb. 17), but was amazed by its inexplicable omission of perhaps the court’s worst recent decision, one in which Scalia, throwing “originalism” and “textualism” to the winds, concurred firmly and enthusiastically with the misguided majority in asserting that money is speech.

If Scalia is indeed the “unrelenting provoker,” this, even though he wrote in concurrence, was a monumental provocation and a mind-boggling distortion of the intent of the Founding Fathers, wealthy plantation owners that many may have been. Citizens United v. FEC is nothing less than a declaration that oligarchy is a constitutionally protected form of democracy.

I would never deny the right of rich people to spend whatever amount of money they want in order to buy a platform from which to express their own personal views as individuals. That’s money facilitating actual speech. But how anyone, no matter how brilliant, could believe that the devastation of the First Amendment — and of our very system of government — that was created by Citizens United was justified leaves me baffled.