Supreme Court Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson is getting some attention for stating that, “my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways.”
But the only problem there is that Jackson was dumb enough to say the quiet part out loud in which the Supreme Court, notably including Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh appear to be leaning on the idea that the government has a right to tell companies to censor particular individuals for political reasons, as long as the government doesn’t do anything more than say it, without making further blatant threats to the company.
Yes, Jackson is terrible, but consider the obnoxiousness of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Justice Elena Kagan and Chief Justice John Roberts snickering together about the idea of government censorship.
“I had assumed, thought, experienced–government press people throughout the federal government who regularly call up the media and berate them,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said, while acknowledging that some of the government messages to the platforms referring to them as partners were probably not common in dealings with traditional media.
“Like Justice Kavanaugh, I have had some experience encouraging press to suppress their own speech,” Kagan said as Kavanaugh and others in the courtroom chuckled. “This happens literally thousands of times a day in the federal government.”
“I have no experience coercing anybody,” Chief Justice John Roberts chimed in, also prompting laughter.
Hilarious.
Between Roberts, Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the media’s court reporters seemed to think that lower court rulings barring the White House from telling social media monopolies to censor views they don’t like are doomed.
And it sounds like they’re right.
While Kentanji Brown Jackson may have said the quiet part out loud, a whole bunch of even the ‘conservative’ justices agree with her that it would be dangerous not to let the government tell social media monopolies to take down certain political views and that the First Amendment should not get in the way of government censorship.
And at that point the First Amendment is effectively null and void.