Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., quoted Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s disastrous decision in a would-be landmark speech-censorship case in order to argue that the federal government was not engaged in mass censorship of conservatives.
During the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on The Constitution hearing, Welch said the Supreme Court “rejected the allegation that government had unconstitutionally censored conservatives by pressuring social media companies to take down posts.”
“That was a 6-3 decision by Judge Amy Coney Barrett that found no merits to the claims. Justice Barrett wrote, ‘It’s therefore difficult to say that the White House was responsible (even in part),’” he added.
That decision, Murthy v. Missouri, was written by Barrett to absolve the federal government of any wrongdoing in coercing social media organizations to censor disfavored speech about the coronavirus pandemic — despite the “vast” sea of evidence to the contrary, as Justice Samuel Alito wrote in dissent.
The opinion punted the issue of coercion and censorship by finding that plaintiffs had a lack of standing to sue, refusing to address the merits or evidence clearly showing a vast censorship regime at work to downgrade conservative or otherwise inconvenient points of view.
Welch denied that the government was involved in such censorship. Democrat witness Mary Anne Franks, a far-left law professor at George Washington University, was also there to erroneously claim that the Supreme Court had found “no evidence” of collusion between the Biden administration and big tech on censorship.
“The myth of the censorship-industrial complex, a conspiracy that is so ludicrous that even the current conservative-dominated Supreme Court has dismissed it out of hand last year, has been used to vilify and harass experts, students, researchers, and nonprofits working on online misinformation, with the express goal of discrediting, defunding, and dismantling that work,” she said. “The disabling of safeguards against foreign and domestic misinformation and media manipulation is a threat to free speech and to national security.”
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., referencing some of Franks’ writings against free speech, said, “Of all the people that could have been selected to come testify about the dangers of limiting free speech and censorship, my colleagues on the other side chose someone who believes that the First Amendment is essentially a white male fetish.”
Notably Alito wrote that there was evidence “more than sufficient to establish” standing for at least one plaintiff. But leaving the standing issue aside, the justice also argued that, while the court is “obligated to tackle the free speech issue,” the decision in Murthy “shirks that duty and thus permits … this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.”
“Murthy is ultimately about enabling an enormous censorship-industrial complex to control individuals’ conversations — and by extension, individuals’ relationships — at the behest of government actors,” as Stella Morabito wrote in these pages.
More to the point, as Alito said explicitly, “For months in 2021 and 2022, a coterie of officials at the highest levels of the Federal Government continuously harried and implicitly threatened Facebook with potentially crippling consequences if it did not comply with their wishes about the suppression of certain COVID–19-related speech. … These past and threatened future injuries were caused by and traceable to censorship that the officials coerced.”
“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,” he continued. “If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send.”
As The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway pointed out in testimony during the hearing, Democrats like Welch are able to play dumb about the censorship-industrial complex because it works for their political movement.
They are also able to play dumb because Barrett’s decision gave them the ammunition to claim it does not exist in the first place.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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