A mixed bag, but I don’t care what their reasoning was on any one, I’m glad they decided as they did on the first two and disagree with the third.
From ASSOCIATED PRESS:
The Supreme Court rules for Biden administration in a social media dispute with conservative states
The Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with the Biden administration in a dispute with Republican-led states over how far the federal government can go to combat controversial social media posts on topics including COVID-19 and election security.
By a 6-3 vote, the justices threw out lower-court rulings that favored Louisiana, Missouri and other parties in their claims that officials in the Democratic administration leaned on the social media platforms to unconstitutionally squelch conservative points of view.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the court that the states and other parties did not have the legal right, or standing, to sue. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented.
The decision should not affect typical social media users or their posts.
The case is among several before the court this term that affect social media companies in the context of free speech. In February, the court heard arguments over Republican-passed laws in Florida and Texas that prohibit large social media companies from taking down posts because of the views they express. In March, the court laid out standards for when public officials can block their social media followers.
The cases over state laws and the one that was decided Wednesday are variations on the same theme, complaints that the platforms are censoring conservative viewpoints.
The states had argued that White House communications staffers, the surgeon general, the FBI and the U.S. cybersecurity agency are among those who applied “unrelenting pressure” to coerce changes in online content on social media platforms.
The justices appeared broadly skeptical of those claims during arguments in March and several worried that common interactions between government officials and the platforms could be affected by a ruling for the states.
The Biden administration underscored those concerns when it noted that the government would lose its ability to communicate with the social media companies about antisemitic and anti-Muslim posts, as well as on issues of national security, public health and election integrity.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the court reached the right outcome because “it helps ensure the Biden Administration can continue our important work with technology companies to protect the safety and security of the American people, after years of extreme and unfounded Republican attacks on public officials who engaged in critical work to keep Americans safe.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill called the decision “unfortunate and disappointing.” The court majority, Murrill said in a statement, “gives a free pass to the federal government to threaten tech platforms into censorship and suppression of speech that is indisputably protected by the First Amendment. The majority waves off the worst government coercion scheme in history.”
The justices did not weigh in on the substance of the states’ claims or the administration’s response in their decision Wednesday.
“We begin — and end — with standing,” Barrett wrote. “At this stage, neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have established standing to seek an injunction against any defendant. We therefore lack jurisdiction to reach the merits of the dispute.”
In dissent, Alito wrote that the states amply demonstrated their right to sue. “For months, high-ranking government officials placed unrelenting pressure on Facebook to suppress Americans’ free speech. Because the court unjustifiably refuses to address this serious threat to the First Amendment, I respectfully dissent,” he wrote for the three justices in the minority.
Some free speech advocates praised the result, but lamented how little guidance the court provided.
“The platforms are attractive targets for official pressure, and so it’s crucial that the Supreme Court clarify the line between permissible attempts to persuade and impermissible attempts to coerce,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute. “This guidance would have been especially valuable in the months leading up to the election.”
Nina Jankowicz was named in the original lawsuit after being appointed in 2022 to lead a new board within the Department of Homeland Security to tackle disinformation. The board was dissolved within weeks amid conspiracy theories and criticism from Republicans and conservative activists who saw the effort as a political tool to regulate free speech.
Jankowicz, an expert in disinformation, said the Supreme Court had done what she had expected. But she said the damage from the lawsuit is not easily fixed.
“Unfortunately, there is an entire class of people that now believes the government, in coordination with independent researchers, is censoring some part of the American population,” she said. “I don’t think that’s going to go away anytime soon.”
Justices seem set to allow emergency abortions in Idaho for now, a prematurely posted opinion says
the Supreme Court appears poised to allow emergency abortions in Idaho when a pregnant patient’s health is at serious risk, according to a copy of the opinion briefly posted on the court’s website Wednesday and obtained by Bloomberg News.
The document suggests the court will find that it should not have gotten involved in the case over Idaho’s strict abortion ban so quickly. By a 6-3 vote it would reinstate a lower court order that had allowed hospitals in the state to perform emergency abortions to protect a pregnant patient’s health.
Such an outcome would leave the issues at the heart of the case unresolved. It would also mean key questions remain unanswered, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a concurrence.
“Today’s decision is not a victory for pregnant patients in Idaho. It is delay,” she wrote.
The Supreme Court acknowledged that its publications unit inadvertently posted a document Wednesday. An opinion in the Idaho case would be issued “in due course,” court spokeswoman Patricia McCabe said in a statement.
Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch are listed as dissenting from the decision.
Supreme Court overturns ex-mayor’s bribery conviction, narrowing the scope of public corruption law
The Supreme Court overturned the bribery conviction of a former Indiana mayor on Wednesday, the latest in a series of decisions narrowing the scope of federal public corruption law.
The high court’s 6-3 opinion along ideological lines found the law criminalizes bribes given before an official act, not rewards handed out after. (More Republican Just Us)
“Some gratuities can be problematic. Others are commonplace and might be innocuous,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote. The lines aren’t always clear, especially since many state and local officials have other jobs, he said.
The high court sided with James Snyder, a Republican who was convicted of taking $13,000 from a trucking company after prosecutors said he steered about $1 million worth of city contracts to the company.
Snyder was elected mayor of Portage, a small Indiana city near Lake Michigan, in 2011 and was removed from office when he was first convicted in 2019. He has maintained his innocence, saying the money he received was payment for consulting work. His attorneys said that prosecutors hadn’t proved there was a “quid pro quo” exchange agreement before the contracts were awarded.
The Justice Department countered that the law was clearly meant to cover gifts “corruptly” given to public officials as rewards for favored treatment.
Kavanaugh, writing for the high court majority, disagreed, finding that interpretation would “create traps for unwary state and local officials” and would “subject 19 million public officials to a new regulatory regime,” though he said a gratuity could be unethical or illegal under other laws.
In a sharply worded dissent joined by her liberal colleagues, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the distinction between bribes and gratuities ignores the wording of the law aimed at rooting out public corruption.
“Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one that only today’s court could love,” she wrote.
The decision continues a pattern in recent years of the court restricting the government’s ability to use broad federal laws to prosecute public corruption cases. The justices also overturned the bribery conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in 2016 and sharply curbed prosecutors’ use of an anti-fraud law in the case of ex-Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling in 2010.
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Jackson's dissent is a beaut, and you KNOW she wanted to mention InJustices Thomas and Alito. I also was reminded: We never did find out who paid Barf Kavanaugh's credit card bills.
God bless Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. May she have a Court some day that is not corrupt.