A divided federal appellate panel approved a ban on Michigan middle schoolers wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts to school. The panel rejected a First Amendment appeal and said the school district reasonably understood the slogan to be vulgar, over dissent that said the majority failed to properly weigh court precedent and the message’s political significance.
The decision split two Trump appointees on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, with Judge John Nalbandian writing the majority opinion and Judge John Bush dissenting.
Joined by Clinton-appointed Judge Karen Nelson Moore, Nalbandian explained the background on what became an anti-Joe Biden phrase used by conservatives:
In October 2021, a professional NASCAR driver named Brandon Brown won his first major race at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. While a reporter was interviewing him, the crowd began to audibly chant “Fuck Joe Biden.”
The reporter interjected, “You can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s Go Brandon.’”
Nalbandian noted that the clear disconnect between what the crowd was chanting and what the reporter said led to the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” becoming “for lack of a better term, a meme.”
The court case stemmed from a woman who gave her sons “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts for Christmas. When the two brothers wore them to Tri County Middle School in Howard City, Michigan, officials told them to take them off, reasoning that the phrase “means the F-word” and has a “profane double meaning,” Nalbandian wrote in the opinion. The dress code prohibited clothing with “with messages or illustrations that are lewd, indecent, vulgar, or profane.”
Through their mother, the brothers sued the school and the federal district court rejected them. The 6th Circuit panel majority agreed with the district court that the students’ rights weren’t violated and that school officials’ actions complied with the First Amendment.
“In the schoolhouse, vulgarity trumps politics,” Nalbandian wrote, adding that “the protection for political speech doesn’t give a student carte blanche to use vulgarity at school — even when that vulgarity is cloaked in innuendo or euphemism.” In his dissent, Bush said the majority incorrectly applied Supreme Court precedent and gave the students’ rights short shrift in the process. He emphasized that the sweatshirts “were gifts from the students’ mother, who approved of her kids wearing the sweatshirts to school as an ideological statement. By displaying the message on these shirts publicly, the students participated in the broader civic discourse, a notion that the Supreme Court has never rendered inappropriate for the school environment.” Bush said the majority’s ruling diverged from how other federal appeals courts have applied Supreme Court precedent. Such a split could make it more likely that the justices weigh in to resolve it if the appeal continues. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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