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On June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the federal government in the Murthy v. Missouri case regarding official communications between the government and social media platforms. In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court stated that the plaintiffs did not have the legal standing to seek an injunction against the Biden administration.
Watch the above video as Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten argues that the SCOTUS ruling was a “dereliction of duty of the highest order” and undermines Americans’ right to free speech.
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The most consequential point in the Supreme Court’s opinion in Murthy v. Missouri, a case concerning arguably the greatest attack on free speech in the history of the republic, may have come in a footnote.
“Because we do not reach the merits,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, wrote for the majority, “we express no view as to whether the Fifth Circuit correctly articulated the standard for when the Government transforms private conduct into state action.”
That it felt the need to make explicit the already obvious could be seen more as a self-indictment than any kind of cautionary note to the defendants; that it was confined to a footnote mirrored the way the court shrunk from its duty in how it ruled — or refused to rule — on the vital matters at hand.
The plaintiffs in Murthy had obtained and marshaled voluminous evidence demonstrating that senior White House officials and federal agencies coerced, cajoled, and colluded — sometimes leveraging putatively private cutouts as proxies — with social media companies to suppress disfavored news and opinions en masse on matters ranging from the Hunter Biden laptop story to election integrity and COVID-19.
Government cannot make private sector entities do that from which government itself is prohibited, including violating the First Amendment by abridging our right to free speech.
