"Press access is a privilege, not a right." This is the most common objection to the argument that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment by banning news outlets it doesn't like from the White House. But the fact that you don't have a right to something in the first place doesn't mean the government can take it away to punish you for exercising your First Amendment rights. Federal courts have reaffirmed this principle many times. Nobody has an automatic right to a property tax exemption. But in Speiser v. Randall (1958), the Supreme Court held that California could not deny one to residents who refused to sign a loyalty oath. Nobody has a right to a government contract. But in Board of County Commissioners v. Umbehr (1996), the Supreme Court held that a Kansas county could not cancel a trash-hauling contract just because the contractor wrote editorials criticizing the county government. The same principle applies in other contexts. Nobody has a right to be a professor at a public university. But firing a professor over his liberal or conservative beliefs would violate the First Amendment. A driver's license may be a privilege. That doesn't mean the state can revoke your license just because you criticized the governor. If the rule were otherwise, the government would have enormous power to do exactly what the First Amendment forbids it from doing: punish Americans for saying things the government doesn't like.