The Fourth of July tends to be a rather quiet day for the federal judiciary. But as my colleague Lisa Rubin reminded us, “No district court judge issues a 155-page opinion on a federal holiday (much less July 4th) unless he intends to make a career-altering statement and craves major media attention.”
It was against this backdrop that The Washington Post reported on a stunning court ruling issued on the national holiday.
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked key Biden administration agencies and officials from meeting and communicating with social media companies about “protected speech,” in an extraordinary preliminary injunction in an ongoing case that could have profound effects on the First Amendment.
By most measures, this is an odd case. Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri filed a federal lawsuit, challenging U.S. officials’ outreach to social media companies. While officials obviously aren’t in a position to issue edicts, dictating what content the private online platforms could publish, the Biden administration has urged the companies to prioritize public safety.
For example, officials asked companies such as Twitter and Facebook not to contribute to vaccine hesitancy during a pandemic.
The GOP attorneys general had a problem with this — and they found a Trump-appointed district court judge who agreed with them.
Judge Terry Doughty hasn’t yet issued a final ruling, but he nevertheless issued an injunction on the Fourth of July, restricting U.S. officials from communicating with social media companies about their content.
In fact, the injunction restricts government agencies — from the White House to the Department of Health and Human Services to the FBI — from talking to social media companies for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
This might seem to affect information related to public health, since it was misinformation related to Covid that helped inspire the Republicans’ case, but we’re not just talking about lifesaving vaccines.
A New York Times report added that federal agencies and tech giants “have long worked together to take action against illegal or harmful material, especially in cases involving child sexual abuse, human trafficking and other criminal activity. That has also included regular meetings to share information on the Islamic State and other terrorist groups.”
All of this has been common during the Biden administration, but it was also routine during the Trump and Obama administrations. As of Tuesday, however, a Republican-approved judge wants the interactions to stop, regardless of the consequences.
The Biden administration has struggled when dealing with other Trump-appointed judges, but as the Times’ report added, Doughty has stood out: He “previously blocked the Biden administration’s national vaccination mandate for health care workers and overturned its ban on new federal leases for oil and gas drilling.” To my eyes, the July Fourth injunction was the most ridiculous of them all: Doughty whined in his lengthy ruling that much of the offending content was “right-wing or conservative political views.” But U.S. officials didn’t target conservative information; it challenged false information. It’s not reality’s fault that the right keeps pushing nonsense. Kevin Drum, apparently gobsmacked, concluded: “As recently as a few years ago this case would have been dismissed with extreme prejudice and the lawyers told they’d be held in contempt if they ever wasted the court’s time again with stuff like this. Today it produces a bizarre injunction against half a dozen agencies — the entire Census Bureau! all of the CDC! the Surgeon General! — along with several dozen named Biden officials prohibiting them from entirely voluntary interactions with a specific set of 21 social media platforms plus ‘like companies.’” An appeal seems likely. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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