Supreme Court lets Biden admin off the hook for suppressing free speech it deemed 'misinformation'

Missouri v. Biden, the case that became known as Murthy v. Missouri before the U.S. Supreme Court, came about in response to the Democratic administration's well-documented efforts to shut down critics and questioners of its COVID-19 policies and preferred narratives during the pandemic — policies and narratives that have largely been demonstrated in the years since to have been unfounded, ruinous, or both.

The states of Missouri and Louisiana were joined by other plaintiffs, including the coauthors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, in taking legal action against President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Anthony Fauci, and various Biden administration officials.

Last year, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, who heard the case before it was kicked up to the high court, suggested the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits in establishing "that the Government has used is power to silence the opposition."

Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden's policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature.

Three of the so-called conservative justices on the Supreme Court joined Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in concluding Wednesday that neither "the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established Article III standing to seek an injunction against any defendant."

Barrett penned the majority opinion, noting, "The plaintiffs rely on allegations of past government censorship as evidence that future censorship is likely. But they fail, by and large, to link their past social-media restrictions to the defendants' communications with the platforms."

'The successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.'

Barrett cast doubt on the causal link between the Biden administration's many efforts to have those with dissenting views censored online and social media platforms' ultimate censorship efforts.

The former Notre Dame professor indicated that of all the individual plaintiffs, health care activist Jill Hines of Health Freedom Louisiana made the "best showing of a connection between her social-media restrictions and communications between the relevant platform (Facebook) and specific defendants (CDC and the White House)."

"That said," continued Barrett, "most of the lines she draws are tenuous, particularly given her burden of proof at the preliminary injunction stage — recall that she must show that her restrictions are likely traceable to the White House and the CDC."

"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," Barrett said in her conclusion. "This Court's standing doctrine prevents us from 'exercis[ing such] general legal oversight' of the other branches of Government."

The majority reversed the injunctions against the Biden administration's various censorious elements.

Justice Samuel Alito filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, in which he stated, "If the lower courts' assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years."

'Free speech in America, for the moment, is dead.'

"Freedom of speech serves many valuable purposes, but its most important role is protection of speech that is essential to democratic self-government ... and speech that advances humanity’s store of knowledge, thought, and expression in fields such as science, medicine, history, the social sciences, philosophy, and the arts," wrote Alito, adding that the speech stifled by the Biden administration fell "squarely into those categories."

Alito acknowledged that private entities are not subject to the First Amendment, but government officials cannot coerce them to suppress speech. He emphasized that there is ample evidence the Biden administration did just that and noted further that the majority shirked the duty to tackle the free speech at issue in Murthy, thus permitting "the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think."

Alito slammed the efforts by Biden's cabal of high-ranking bureaucrats as "dangerous," noting both their censorship was "blatantly unconstitutional" and that the country may come to regret the majority's decision.

Contrary to the liberal justices' understanding, Alito also indicated that in the case of Hines, she had indeed made the requisite showing of traceability, adding that the presence of censorship on the social media platforms prior to direct governmental involvement did not subsequently complicate shows of causality as otherwise suggested.

"For months, high-ranking Government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans' free speech," Alito noted in his conclusion. "Because the Court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent."

Bhattacharya noted on X following the court's ruling, "The Supreme Court just ruled in the Murthy v. Missouri case that the Biden Administration can coerce social media companies to censor and shadowban people and posts it doesn't like."

"This now also becomes a key issue in the upcoming election. Where do the presidential candidates stand on social media censorship? We know where Biden stands since his lawyers argue that he has near monarchical power over social media speech," continued Bhattacharya. "The court ruled that the plaintiffs (Missouri and Louisiana, as well as me and other blacklisted individuals) lacked standing to sue. This means that the Administration can censor ideas & no person will have standing to enforce the 1st Amendment. Free speech in America, for the moment, is dead."

Other supporters of free speech denounced the outcome.

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, among them, said, "The Court majority has rubber-stamped a way for the federal government to censor speech that it doesn't like. The Court is telling would be censors: you can't directly censor speech but if you pursue a sophisticated plan with enough subtlety you can get away with doing indirectly what the Constitution clearly ... forbids you from doing directly."

Blaze Media cofounder and nationally syndicated radio host Glenn Beck wrote, "The Supreme Court has ruled that, practically, the government can continue pressuring social media companies to censor Americans. This is an absolute gut punch."

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