The Supreme Court Will Rule on Censorship

Missouri v. Biden goes to the high court, setting up a historic showdown. Did administration lawyers make a tactical error?

The Borg has made a mistake.

Yesterday, just shy of a week after the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction barring the White House, the FBI, the Surgeon General, and four other government entities from flagging content to social media companies, attorneys for the Biden administration applied to the high court to stay the ruling. Missouri v. Biden is headed to the Supreme Court.

It wasn’t a certainty they’d do this. The 5th Circuit after all vacated each of district court Judge Terry Doughty’s ten orders on social media contacts but one, and “tailored” the remaining 6th provision to a single paragraph:

Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social-media companies’ decision-making processes.

After the 5th Circuit ruling, in other words, only government action against protected free speech remained barred by this injunction. The Biden administration just told the world “grave and irreparable harm” would result from such limitations.