| The recent Supreme Court decisions, that made all the news, were less important than a barely-noticed District Court ruling which happened on Independence Day. |
Recently the Supreme Court handed down three decisions that set fire to the news cycles.
| Name of Case | Who Won? | Result of Decision |
| Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard | Students for Fair Admission | Universities can’t refuse admission based on someone’s skin color. |
| 303 Creative v. Elena | 303 Creative | The government can’t force a person to create/express speech they disagree with. |
| Biden vs. Nebraska | Nebraska | The president can’t spend a ½ trillion dollars on a pet project to buy votes, without Congressional approval |
Coming out just before the extended July 4th Holiday weekend, these three back-to-back decisions did a good job reminding the Left that our nation’s laws matter—not least, US Constitutional law.
What’s surprising is that these questions needed clarifying at all. Take that first one. You might say: “Hold on, didn’t the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibit universities and businesses from discriminating against people based on their race?”
Yeah, it did. But it seems every half century or so, people need to be reminded that you’re not allowed to break the law. The Civil Rights Act just received a needed booster shot. Probably some future Supreme Court will have to clarify again—because if there’s one thing the last fifty years have proven, it’s that the Left (especially in academia) loves to discriminate against people based on skin color. But for now, they’ve had their hand slapped and we’re probably safe for awhile.
The second one wasn’t quite so obvious. Yeah, we all know the government can’t restrict or compel speech. That wasn’t the question. The question was whether the act of creating a website, much of which involves communication, can be considered “speech” for First Amendment purposes. The Supreme Court decided that a website that communicates speech which the creator finds objectionable, is something you can’t force the creator to build. In this case the subject matter was a gay marriage, but the decision comes into focus if you visualize a Jewish website creator being asked to create a website celebrating, say, a neo-Nazi rally. If the Supreme Court had ruled otherwise, a Jew could in fact have been forced to create a neo-Nazi website. Good call, Supreme Court!
The final one was the most obvious of all. The Constitution clearly and unequivocally gives Congress the “power of the purse,” as it’s called. The Administrative Branch has some discretion around the margins in terms of how and when certain spending occurs, but the spending itself—including vast, almost incomprehensible amounts of spending like half-a-trillion-dollars, can only come from Congress. Why was this even in dispute? Actually, it wasn’t. Even Democrat Grand Dame Nancy Pelosi herself appeared on video making clear that the President cannot forgive school loans. “Only Congress can do that,” she explained, correctly. Obama said the same thing, when he was president. And even our current president agreed. “I don’t have the power to forgive student loans,” Biden acknowledged, roughly a year ago.
OK, so if everyone agreed, why did we need a Supreme Court decision? Well, you see the 2022 election was coming up, and Biden decided if he gave out the gift of half a trillion dollars in student loan payoffs (using taxpayer money), a ton of voters with college loans would reward the Dems at the polls.
Yeah, but how could he do it if it were illegal?
He willfully broke the law. The Biden administration figured (righty) that if they did it anyway, they’d reap the rewards in the November election, and not have the ruling over-turned until eight months later, which was the earliest the Supreme Court could issue a verdict. And of course that’s exactly what happened.
In hindsight it’s hard to know if that cynical trick achieved its goal, but it’s incontestable that the Dems did better in that election than all pundits had predicted. They were supposed to lose the House by a landslide, and give up their razor thin majority in the Senate. In fact, they held on to the Senate and lost the House by a sliver.
In a better world, a U.S. president who knowingly broke the law and deliberately exceeded his authority in an illegal attempt to buy votes so as to change an election, would be impeached. But we don’t live in that world so Biden got away with it.
Anyway, back to the Supreme Court. All three decisions were expected, and all three were defeats for the Left and victories for the Right. Not surprisingly, the left-wing media melted down into paroxysms of grief and horror, and much ink was spilled to the effect that this means the end of our Democracy. (These days, that’s their favorite phrase, apparently having tired of their earlier tactic of calling opponents racists.) The right-wing media did the opposite, and pushed the theme that these three decisions were necessary to save our Democracy.
All very predictable. But then things got interesting. On the Fourth of July itself, a ruling came down from a Federal district judge issuing a preliminary injunction in State of Missouri vs. Joseph Biden Et Al. At the time, America was eating hotdogs, drinking beer, and watching fireworks, so the whole thing almost didn’t get noticed.
But this seemingly minor preliminary injunction, issued by a mere district judge, is likely to be far more important, and have far greater impact on our Democracy, and possibly the world itself, compared to all three of those SCOTUS decisions combined. In short, those earlier decisions didn’t change laws as we know them, they just repaired the guardrails on laws that were already there but were being ignored.
But Missouri vs. Biden is huge.
Why?
Because it clarified something desperately in need of clarifying. We all know the government can’t censor speech. But the Biden administration—and before that the entrenched bureaucracy (AKA: Deep State) had found a way get around that. When the Constitution was written, we didn’t have social media. “Speech” occurred either in print (books, newspapers) or in public interactions—the proverbial “town square.”
For over two hundred years, our First Amendment kept the government from censoring printed speech it didn’t like, or prohibiting the public from exercising free speech in the town square. Fine. But roughly twenty years ago, social media was born and the world changed. No one went to the town square to exchange ideas anymore. It was all done via social media—accessed via smart phones and laptops.
So the government realized it could crush speech it disagreed with just by going to the private companies who operated those platforms (Twitter, Facebook YouTube, etc.) and strong-arming them into banning such speech. You see, the First Amendment doesn’t prevent private entities from curtailing speech—just the government. And those social media platforms were all private entities. So—long story short (and books are already being written about this) the government simply went to those companies and extorted them into censoring the speech the government itself was prohibited from censoring.
Clever, huh? The government tried to put lipstick on this pig by declaring it a noble effort to “combat misinformation.” Sounds reasonable, right? Well, no, because misinformation was defined as any speech that the government disagreed with. That’s not how they put it, of course, but that was the reality.
So under the guise of combating that horrific villain “misinformation” the government successfully pressured the social media companies into censoring—among other things—speech that suggested the following:
- Covid was created artificially in the Wuhan lab.
- Fauci’s organization had used taxpayer money to subsidize the research at that lab.
- Masks were ineffective at stopping transmission of the virus.
- Lockdowns were ineffective at stopping transmission of the virus, and caused huge social harm.
- It was almost exclusively the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions who were at risk from the virus—young adults and children were at very low risk.
- There were existing, safe medications that were effective against the virus, such as ivermectin.
- Survivors of Covid had antibodies and thus had natural immunity—more powerful than a vaccine.
- The vaccine had no ability to prevent transmission—and the pharma companies that created it had never even claimed it could.
- Allowing biological men to compete against women in women’s sports was unfair, as biological men had an unfair advantage.
- Hunter Biden’s laptop, which held vast evidence of the Biden family’s global influence-peddling bribery racket, was real, and it wasn’t a Russian hoax.
This last one became more important than merely life-and-death Covid facts—it had the potential to change the 2020 election, and arguably it did. Polls have shown that if the public had known the laptop was real, and knew the facts it revealed, enough voters would have changed their votes, in swing states, to have cost Biden the election.
Of course we now know that every item on that above list, which government at the time labelled disinformation and forced tech companies to censor via social media control, was in fact true.
Wait, do you mean the government had found a way around the First Amendment? It effectively was able to repeal the First Amendment, by using “private” tech companies to censor “public square” speech?
Yes, that’s exactly what happened. And a government effectively able to censor speech is something far more dangerous to democracy than college admissions based on skin color, website designers forced to promote gay weddings, or a rogue president able to spend money not authorized by Congress.
But now, thanks to that District Court judge in Louisiana, the jig is up. The government’s First Amendment work-around has been stopped.
The fact that the Biden administration’s assault on our most cherished freedom—the one at the very core of our democracy—was crushed on THE FOURTH OF JULY underscores the significance of that holiday more than the most breathtaking fireworks display ever could.
Jacques Voorhees 