On a vote of 6-3, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that the plaintiffs who brought the case didn’t have standing in a lawsuit over the Biden Administration’s efforts to censor Americans’ viewpoints on social media.
The case and the injunction that went with it were thrown out and remanded in Murthy v. Missouri.
The state attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana had accused the Biden Administration of collusion with Facebook and censorship-via-surrogate in what the Biden lawyers said was simply an effort to combat misinformation. The Biden Administration pressured companies to not allow dissenting opinions about Covid-19, the ridiculousness of government face mask policies, and even the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Alaska’s attorney general had filed an amicus brief supporting the plaintiffs. It said, in part, “The district court and the Fifth Circuit found that federal officials engaged in a years-long campaign to influence the content-moderation decisions of social
media platforms by applying ‘unrelenting pressure’ to those platforms to change content-moderation policies to allow easier suppression of disfavored speech.”
The actual allegation of government censorship may indeed hold water in a court case, but the justices ruled that two states and five social media users do not have the legal standing to sue because they could not show harm. They were simply not the proper litigants.
Doctors who dissented from the government position on Covid were represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which wrote that the high court has “green-lighted the government’s unprecedented censorship regime.”
“Today’s decision Murthy v. Missouri enables the censorship industrial complex and will have grave consequences for Americans’ freedom for years to come. As a practical matter, for the vast majority of plaintiffs, including @AaronKheriatyMD, @DrJBhattacharya, @MartinKulldorff, and @HealthFreedomLA, the Court’s decision effectively erases the First Amendment in the age of technology,” the Alliance wrote.
The decision means that, for now, the government’s requests to tech companies to remove social media posts that the Biden Administration may continue.
“The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the years-long communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different topics,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion. “This court’s standing doctrine prevents us from ‘exercis[ing such] general legal oversight’ of the other branches of government.”
Barrett wrote, “Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant.” Thus, “We therefore reverse the judgment of the Fifth Circuit and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
In addition to doctors, the plaintiffs included a conservative political blog, “The Gateway Pundit,” which reacted to the ruling by stating that the court has ruled “the Biden Administration’s policy of deleting, suppressing, and deplatforming specific people, topics, and ideas is immune from suit, leaving no one able to challenge it in court.”
A Louisiana judge had earlier ruled in favor of The Gateway Pundit and accused federal agencies of taking on the role of “an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” His decision was upheld in part by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which said the Biden Administration had strong-armed platforms into taking down content. The court issued an injunction that had stopped the government from such communications.
The Supreme Court has now ruled that “the fifth circuit was wrong” in its conclusions. The court found that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that they faced substantial risk of harm from the government.
Conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented with the majority opinion. Alito wrote the dissenting opinion, saying this is “one of the most important free speech cases to reach this court in years,” and that the Biden Administration’s arm-twisting was “blatantly unconstitutional.”
If two states and a handful of doctors don’t have standing, the question remains, who would?
“The Supreme Court is making it procedurally impossible for a citizen or a state to challenge the government’s ability to silence your digital speech. The practical consequence of this decision is to re-open the floodgates of social media censorship and speech suppression,” the conservative publication wrote.
“In sum, the court rules that the two different types of parties, states, and individuals harmed by these government policies, do not have ‘standing’ to sue. This case procedurally related to the request for a preliminary injunction for the government to stop the censorship regime while the case was going on,” The Gateway Pundit wrote.
