SCOTUS Missed Opportunity to Uphold Freedom of Speech

Written by Robert Knight

The U.S. Supreme Court works in strange and mysterious ways.

It can enrage the progressive left with a solidly constitutional ruling like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the issue of abortion to the states.

But it can also amaze and frustrate conservatives, as when it refused before and after the 2020 election to review Pennsylvania officials’ unconstitutional changes to election procedures.

“We failed to settle this dispute before the election and thus provide clear rules. Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his dissent. “The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling.”

The high court also threw out a complaint by Texas and other states that several other states had illegally altered election procedures in the 2020 election. The plaintiffs had no standing, the court said.

This past week, the court again declined to take up a clear case of government malfeasance by denying standing in Murthy v. Missouri.

Louisiana and Missouri sued the federal government for bullying social media into censoring views and information that the Biden administration didn’t like.

The case revolved around blocking nonofficial COVID-19 information and election integrity discussions.

Biden administration officials had urged Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms to block messaging that conflicts with the federal health establishment’s dictates regarding vaccines, masking, lockdowns and even theories that the COVID-19 virus originated in a Chinese lab.

Two of the plaintiffs are public health researchers Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, who spearheaded the Great Barrington Declaration. Signed by thousands of medical authorities and scientists, that document criticized the mass lockdowns and promoted instead time-tested targeting of vulnerable populations — not everyone — as the pandemic took hold.

Since then, many of the government’s “truths” have been debunked, such as the claim that the vaccinations prevent infection or transmission or that everyone is equally threatened by the virus. Health authorities also lied about harmless therapeutics like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which they said were “dangerous.”

The government has also coerced social media into blocking as “misinformation” many posts that question the fairness of the 2020 election and which call for tighter election security and more scrutiny of vote fraud claims.

Social media may be privately owned, but it is powerful and has arguably become a public conveyance like the broadcasting spectrum, telephone lines and the internet itself.

Thus, when the government leans on social media to suppress dissent and carry its preferred messaging, the government engages in illegal censorship.

“After months of emails and phone calls in which White House officials accused platforms such as Facebook of ’killing people’ and fomenting ’insurrection,’ the platforms caved and rewrote their content-moderation policies to suit the Biden administration’s preferences,” wrote Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky. “The lower courts were aghast.”

Yet in a 6-3 ruling written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, the court threw out the case, ruling that the plaintiffs did not have standing.

“In just the past few terms, the court pulled similar maneuvers in cases involving student loan cancellation, border enforcement, and federal approval of abortifacients,” Mr. von Spakovsky said.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his dissent that the court had no such qualms about standing when it came to claims of injury from climate change or the Trump administration’s placing a question about citizenship on the census form.

We keep hearing that this U.S. Supreme Court is “right-wing” or “far right.” But it is not. It gets some things right, such as smacking the Environmental Protection Agency in 2023 and again this week for overreaching its authority, but it often bails on big questions.

In 2015, the court struck down all state laws and constitutional amendments defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman — the bedrock of any stable society.

Its Obergefell ruling imposing same-sex marriage took a wrecking ball to common sense, morality and democracy and unleashed a tyrannical legal framework to punish dissent.

Then, in its 2020 Bostock ruling, the court expanded civil rights categories to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” The majority opinion, written by Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch, opened Pandora’s box, fueling the transgender movement’s invasion of women’s sports and girls’ and women’s locker rooms.

The ruling also opened the door to “gender-affirming care,” which is a euphemism for the fiction that medicine and surgery can change someone’s biological sex. This has put thousands of children at risk of gruesome experimentation.

The court recently agreed to hear a case that might undo some damage. The Biden administration is challenging a Tennessee law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender “transition” surgery on minors.

The court could end this barbaric form of child abuse by upholding the Tennessee law. The American Civil Liberties Union, not surprisingly, is siding with the Biden administration, saying the Tennessee law protecting children is “dangerous and discriminatory.”

Yes, it does pose a danger — to the quacks making a fortune off these poor, confused kids with treatments that could damage them for life and increase their chance of killing themselves by up to 10 times.

Let’s hope and pray that the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear the case in October, gets this one right.

It has booted all too many opportunities to do the right thing.

This article was originally published by The Washington Times.

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.