Digging deeper into recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the Biden Administration censorship case, some interesting questions have emerged. Several hypothetical situations came up, which I think are worth a look. By far, the most important comment I’ve heard so far is when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was worried that the First Amendment would be used to hamstring the government. It seems she missed the point of the Bill of Rights.
“Your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods…Some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told Benjamin Aguiñaga, the Louisiana solicitor general.
“I’m really worried about that, because you’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying the government can’t interact with the source of those problems,” Jackson added.
Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley commented:
There are indeed important First Amendment cases here. As someone associated with the free speech community, we’re all on edge. It was chilling in the social media case to hear justices like Jackson repeatedly say, what’s the problem with the government coercing speech? Why shouldn’t they, when there are really troubling periods … like in the pandemic. And many of us were really sort of agape at that, because much of what the government did on censorship was wrong. Many things that they were censoring, by scientists who were fired and disciplined and barred from social media, in some cases. They were vindicated, ultimately, on things like the origin of the virus [in a Chinese lab], showing that it’s not just a possibility, many consider it the leading possibility. Closing of schools. They were vindicated on many of those things. And yet you had Jackson saying, I don’t see why the government can’t coerce social media. So we’re all very concerned where the government will land there.
Does the Constitution mean what it says, or can it be ignored in certain situations?
That is a recurring question in America today, and the Supreme Court has used this idea of a “living constitution” to crush your rights in the past. Today, I’m taking a deeper look at some of the arguments made before the Supreme Court in the Biden Administration Censorship case, Murthy v. Missouri. What I found in some of the questions and statements from the justices truly raised my blood pressure, probably to dangerous levels.
Following that, I examine how the media is once again lying by omission in an attempt to smear former President Trump. Thankfully, in today’s open-source news environment, we can do what Paul Harvey used to do and find the rest of the story.
The Constitution Study with Paul Engel on America Out Loud Talk Radio can be heard on weekdays at 4 pm ET. Listen on iHeart Radio, our world-class media player, or our free Apple, Android, or Alexa apps. Listen to other episodes of The Constitution Study, available on podcast.
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