U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) joined many elected officials and conservative leaders who expressed disappointment with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Murthy v. Missouri on Wednesday.
The Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana and five individual plaintiffs brought this court case.
The Supreme Court justices ruled 6-3 to reverse a lower court injunction barring the federal government from “coercing or significantly encouraging” social media companies to suppress speech, finding that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the case.
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Justice Samuel Alito sided against the majority opinion.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration participated in an online censorship scheme by pressuring social media companies to silence conservative voices on their platforms,” Blackburn said in a statement.
“It’s disappointing Big Tech platforms were not held accountable for censoring opinions the Biden administration deems unacceptable. We must continue fighting to make sure tech companies are not coerced into suppressing certain views simply because the Biden White House doesn’t agree with them,” Blackburn added.
Florida U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL-01) joined Blackburn in expressing disappointment in the Court’s ruling, saying, “Today’s disappointing Supreme Court decision in Murthy v. Missouri, holding that the various states were not harmed by government and Big Tech censorship, is a wake up call to all Americans.”
“Even with “conservative” judges like Amy Coney Barrett, we can’t expect any help from the Courts. If we want to return to a free internet, we must be even stronger in Congress, and ensure that Biden is not in the White House in 2025. A much-needed house cleaning is in order,” Gaetz added.
Businessman and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy also said he was “disappointed” in the ruling, adding, “This flies in the face of precedent,” before citing Alito’s dissenting opinion.
“Alito got it right in his dissent. Government collusion with social media is ‘blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Sadly, I believe we will indeed,” Ramaswamy said.
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was also troubled by the Court’s ruling, saying, “The Supreme Court got it wrong – and has failed to uphold its responsibility to the Constitution by finding no standing in Murthy v. Missouri.”
Jeff Clark, former acting assistant attorney general during the Trump administration, offered a lengthy rebuttal to Wednesday’s ruling, arguing that the Court “wrongly booted the most significant First Amendment case in U.S. history on standing grounds.”
Meanwhile, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said that while Wednesday’s ruling by the nation’s highest court did not grant him and the other plaintiffs standing to bring Murthy v. Missouri, his office has gone ahead and filed suit against “dozens of officials in the federal government to stop the biggest violation of the First Amendment in our nation’s history.”
“The record is clear: the deep state pressured and coerced social media companies to take down truthful speech simply because it was conservative. Today’s ruling does not dispute that,” Bailey said.
“My rallying cry to disappointed Americans is this: Missouri is not done. We are going back to the district court to obtain more discovery in order to root out Joe Biden’s vast censorship enterprise once and for all,” Bailey added.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Marsha Blackburn” by Marsha Blackburn.
