WASHINGTON, DC – Federal officials and the Biden White House can resume censoring conservatives on social media for now, as a divided Supreme Court on Monday stayed a lower court injunction that had blocked such censorship on First Amendment grounds – a decision Justice Samuel Alito called “highly disturbing.”
“This case concerns what two lower courts found to be a coordinated campaign by high-level federal officials to suppress the expression of disfavored views on important public issues,” Alito wrote in a dissent from the court’s ruling, noting that the injunction the justices now blocked had stopped Biden administration officials from “either coercing social media companies to engage in such censorship or actively controlling those companies’ decisions about the content posted on their platforms.”
Then-Missouri Attorney General (now-Senator) Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General (now-Governor-elect) Jeff Landry filed suit. Several private citizens joined, including Covid medical experts whose views on Covid-19 were suppressed on social media, alleging that the Biden administration was suppressing views – including scientific analysis of data – that differed from Joe Biden’s and senior officials’ like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
A federal judge in Louisiana sided with Schmitt and Landry, granting an injunction against White House and Biden administration officials. The court held, “It is the purpose of the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of the market, whether it be by government itself or private licensee.”
The Fifth Circuit federal appeals court affirmed, though modifying the injunction. Biden’s Justice Department sought a stay of that injunction from the U.S. Supreme Court while U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar asked the justices to review the merits of the case.
By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court took the rare step of granting the stay, restoring the power of the Biden administration to pressure social media to suppress the views of the administration’s critics.
Alito dissented from granting the stay, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
“Today … a majority of the Court, … without any explanation, suspends the effect of that injunction until the Court completes its review of this case, an event that may not occur until late in the spring of next year,” Alito continued. “Government censorship of private speech is antithetical to our democratic form of government, and therefore today’s decision is highly disturbing.”
“The injunction applies only when the Government crosses the line and begins to coerce or control others’ exercise of their free-speech rights,” Alito observed. “Does the Government think that the First Amendment allows Executive Branch officials to engage in such conduct?”
“Despite the Government’s conspicuous failure to establish a threat of irreparable harm, the majority stays the injunction and thus allows the defendants to persist in committing the type of First Amendment violations that the lower courts identified,” he added.
Alito stated:
At this time in the history of our country, what the Court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the Government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news.
“That is most unfortunate,” he concluded.
The application is for the case Murthy v. Missouri, No. 23A243 in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Breitbart News senior legal contributor Ken Klukowski is a lawyer who served in the White House and Justice Department. Follow him on X (Twitter) @kenklukowski.
