The Supreme Court is letting us fill up on bread. The entrees continue to be very slow in coming.
This is not to entirely minimize the importance of Murthy v. Missouri, one of two decisions handed down by the Nine Wise Souls on Wednesday. Murthy is a self-contained and fascinating phenomenon of the age of MAGA. In it, by a vote of 6–3, the Court upheld the current administration’s effort to combat misinformation on social media. This case sprang full-blown from the paranoid MAGA imagination—to wit, the belief that the administration is engaged in a concerted effort to eliminate conservative viewpoints. The case was brought on behalf of several benighted states by Louisiana and Missouri, and the majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, held that the states did not have the standing to bring the action in the first place.
“The plaintiffs’ counterarguments are unpersuasive,” Barrett wrote. “First, they argue that they suffer “continuing, present adverse effects” from their past restrictions, as they must now self-censor on social media. But the plaintiffs “cannot manufacture standing merely by inflicting harm on themselves based on their fears of hypothetical future harm that is not certainly impending.”
Second, the plaintiffs suggest that the platforms continue to suppress their speech according to policies initially adopted under Government pressure. But the plaintiffs have a redressability problem. Without evidence of continued pressure from the defendants, the platforms remain free to enforce, or not to enforce, their policies—even those tainted by initial governmental coercion. And the available evidence indicates that the platforms have continued to enforce their policies against COVID–19 misinformation even as the Federal Government has wound down its own pandemic response measures. Enjoining the Government defendants, therefore, is unlikely to affect the platforms’ content-moderation decisions.
The interesting element to the story is how this case got to the Supreme Court in the first place. It came entirely out of the kind of conspiracy thinking that has kept the money rolling into the universe of grifting wherein could be found the conservative mind for the past several decades. Remember the Twitter Papers? That snipe hunt wasted a day of Congress’ time. An example, from Just Security:
The Solicitor General identifies “factual inaccuracies” in the record, including that the “[r]espondents claim that ‘in a single incident, the FBI pushed platforms to remove 929,000 tweets that were political speech by American citizens.’ ” Indeed, the district court also referred favorably to plaintiffs having, in the court’s view, “indicated that 929,000 tweets were political speech by American citizens.” But the Solicitor General notes the underlying document referenced makes clear the tweets referenced were actually sent by 422 accounts controlled by the Russian Internet Research Agency.
This case should have died in the withered landscapes of the MAGA mind. It should have lived in an eternity of conservative television and drive-time radio. It should not have been allowed to breach the barrier of actual reality. (The infamous Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, that wormhole of right-wing crazy, was the vehicle by which it managed to do so.) The primary gatekeepers of the wormhole, Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch, dissented, which figures. The rest of us search for glimmers of hope and wait for the entrees to be served. Pass the bread, please.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.
