Bizarrely, the court denied standing even after conceding that it “may be true” that social-media platforms “continue to suppress [plaintiffs] speech according to policies initially adopted under Government pressure.”
But so why is this not a problem? Did the court decide to hold the government innocent unless there were signed confessions from White House and FBI officials, or what?
by James Bovard
On the eve of the first presidential candidate debate, the Supreme Court gave a huge boost to Joe Biden to help him “fix” the 2024 election with maybe its worst decision of the year. It remains to be seen whether the court’s refusal to stop federal censorship will be a wooden stake in the credibility of American democracy.The whole point of the Bill of Rights is to hamstring would-be federal tyrants.
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The court ruled in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, a lawsuit brought by individuals censored on social media thanks to federal threats and machinations. Court decisions last year vividly chronicled a byzantine litany of anti–free speech interventions by multiple federal agencies and the White House. On July 4, 2023, federal judge Terry Doughty condemned the Biden administration for potentially “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” A federal appeals court imposed injunctions on federal officials to prohibit them from acting “to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce … posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”
State censorship
The decisions documented how the FBI, Biden White House, U.S. Surgeon General, and other federal agencies have sabotaged Americans’ freedom of speech. If you tried to complain about COVID lockdowns, or school shutdowns, or even about whether mail-in ballots caused fraud — your online comments could have been suppressed thanks to threats and string-pulling by the feds or by federal contractors. Conservatives were far more likely to be censored than liberals and leftists.
But the Supreme Court in late June decided to overlook all those abuses. There will be no injunction to stop the White House or federal agencies or federal contractors from suppressing criticism of Biden or his policies before the 2024 election. In a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court gave the benefit of the doubt to federal browbeating, arm-twisting, and jawboning, regardless of how many Americans are wrongfully muzzled.
The Biden censorship industrial complex triumphed because most Supreme Court justices could not be bothered to honestly examine the massive evidence of its abuses. The majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whined that “the record spans over 26,000 pages” and, quoting an earlier court decision, scoffed that “judges are not like pigs, hunting for truffles buried in the record.”
Will that line catch on with school kids? When asked whether they did their homework, they can quote Justice Barrett and tell their teachers that they are “not like pigs hunting for truffles buried in the record” of all their class assignments.
“Lack of standing” a total cop-out
Rather than swine groveling in the muck, the Supreme Court instead disposed of this landmark case on a quibble, putting their legal pinkies up in the air like a white-wine drinker at a cocktail reception. The court ruled that the plaintiffs — including two state governments and eminent scientists banned from social media — did not have “standing” because they had not proven to negligent justices (how many pages in the files did they actually read?) that federal intervention and string-pulling injured them.
Bizarrely, the court denied standing even after conceding that it “may be true” that social-media platforms “continue to suppress [plaintiffs] speech according to policies initially adopted under Government pressure.”
But so why is this not a problem? Did the court decide to hold the government innocent unless there were signed confessions from White House and FBI officials, or what?
Lack of standing was the same legal ploy the Supreme Court used in early 2013 to tacitly absolve the National Security Agency’s vast illegal surveillance regime. After the Supreme Court accepted a case on warrantless wiretaps in 2012, the Obama administration urged the Justices to dismiss the case, claiming it dealt with “state secrets.” A New York Times editorial labeled the administration’s position “a cynical Catch 22: Because the wiretaps are secret and no one can say for certain that their calls have been or will be monitored, no one has standing to bring suit over the surveillance.”
Cynical arguments sufficed for five of the justices. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, declared that the Court was averse to granting standing to challenge the government based on “theories that require guesswork” and “no specific facts” and fears of “hypothetical future harm.” The Supreme Court insisted that the government already offered plenty of safeguards — such as the FISA Court — to protect Americans’ rights. “Lack of standing” didn’t prevent former NSA employee Edward Snowden from blowing the roof off the NSA.
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