Justice Samuel Alito minced no words in his public evisceration of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 Murthy v. Missouri decision to greenlight the Biden administration’s flagrant First Amendment violations.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, officially endorsed the federal government’s widespread attempt to silence dissidents on Wednesday when she concluded that the plaintiffs who brought the case lacked standing because the White House seemingly backed off of its censorship campaign after its 2022 infractions.
Alito, joined in his dissent by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, wrote that Americans, however, will likely regret the high bench’s decision to rubber stamp “blatantly unconstitutional” abuses, which are likely to continue since they were not punished.
“What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive,” he began. “And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.”
While most of his colleagues mocked self-censorship, Alito and his fellow dissidents accurately classified Big Tech and the Biden administration’s coordinated attempt to suppress online speech, especially during the media-fueled panic over Covid-19, as a “serious threat to the First Amendment” that warrants intervention.
The plaintiffs, he wrote, were “indisputably injured” and met the traceability and redressability standards the court requires to weigh in.
