The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear a complaint against a government program that pressured social media companies to censor user’s comments about COVID-19 and the election will only encourage the government to silence the people’s dissent “in a more egregious fashion,” one of the original plaintiffs told The Washington Stand.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled that two states and five social media users did not have legal standing to sue multiple federal government agencies for flagging messages and whole accounts for suppression or deletion for spreading alleged “misinformation” about the novel coronavirus or questioning recent elections. Chief Justice John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s liberal bloc in the 6-3 opinion in Missouri v. Murthy, which remands the case to lower courts for further action.

The federal government engaged in “a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign,” according to the original U.S. District Court’s ruling, focused primarily on Twitter (now X) and Facebook (now known as Meta Platforms). “The government is engaging in censorship by surrogate,” legal expert Jonathan Turley told Fox News. “They have made a mockery of the limits of the First Amendment by doing indirectly what they’re barred from doing directly.”

The 29-page opinion, authored by Barrett, does not contest the underlying evidence — which, the opinion makes clear, its authors have not read in full — and verifies some of it. The lawsuit and “The Twitter Files” revealed that the Biden administration’s censorship efforts involved vast swaths of government agencies, including the White House, FBI, surgeon general’s office, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Barrett acknowledges that the White House director of digital strategy pressured Facebook, to remove a post on COVID by stating, “[L]ast time we did this dance, it ended in an insurrection.” Biden administration officials also raised changing social media platforms’ liability, “perhaps as motivation,” she notes.

Yet she holds the plaintiffs, led by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, “failed to establish an injury that is sufficiently ‘concrete and particularized.’” Namely, each plaintiff would have to prove “traceability” by showing the likelihood of having specific future posts removed thanks directly to a particular government agency.

The opinion also appears to say, once a social media platform internalizes censorious standards at the behest of government, the censorship ceases to be due to the government — and hence, no longer a First Amendment violation. “A court could prevent these government defendants from interfering with the platforms’ independent application of their policies. But without evidence of continued pressure from the defendants, it appears that the platforms remain free to enforce, or not to enforce, those policies—even those tainted by initial governmental coercion,” the opinion states. “[I]f the White House officials have already abandoned their pressure campaign, enjoining them is unlikely to prompt Facebook to stop enforcing the policy (thus failing redressability).”

The opinion also appears to take government claims that it has reformed itself at face value. “CISA, meanwhile, stopped switchboarding in mid-2022, and the [g]overnment has represented that it will not resume operations for the 2024 election,” the opinion relays. But last month, Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) revealed that multiple federal agencies, including the FBI and CISA, plan to ramp up programs targeting “disinformation.” In reality, Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted he had no scientific basis for social distancing; scientific findings preceding the pandemic found that masks provided limited assistance; and a series of troubling findings have dogged the COVID-19 shots.

The majority opinion will only encourage government to continue censoring speech via a third party, according to the 34-page dissent written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. The court has a duty to uphold people’s unalienable rights but, by dodging the substantive issues at hand, it “shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think. That is regrettable.” While the Biden administration’s censorship campaign “was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional” in previous Supreme Court cases, “it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous.”

“It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision … will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send,” wrote Justice Alito.

One of the original plaintiffs — Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry (R), who filed suit as state attorney general — shared concerns that the government would now have a free hand to engage in even worse censorship by proxy.

“I viewed this as the most important First Amendment case this century. And I think that the court just did a complete disservice to the country, to the citizens and to the First Amendment,” said Governor Landry on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Wednesday. “This is not the end” of unelected federal bureaucrats suppressing citizens’ speech, which will only continue “in a more egregious fashion” if they cannot sue to enforce their rights.

“I don’t understand how the state of Louisiana cannot speak for its citizens when the federal government is out there actively encouraging the social [media] platforms to censor American speech,” Landry told Perkins. “That’s what attorneys general and the states are there for,” a point raised by the Founding Fathers in “The Federalist Papers.”

The Supreme Court also denied that pro-life doctors lacked standing to sue over the FDA’s irregular approval of the abortion pill, mifepristone, earlier this month. The series of decisions may presage a return to the Roberts era court’s preference to issue narrow, procedural decisions rather than addressing the constitutional issues underlying the case.

“As usual, the court, when it’s faced with these tough decisions, takes this off ramp of standing,” Landry told Perkins. “It’s basically malpractice.”

But defenders of civil liberties promise to respond with a two-track offensive aimed to curb the powers of the administrative state.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) promised to find the smoking gun in the mounds of evidence proving that the federal government specifically censored individuals. He believes firmly he can satisfy all necessary conditions to prevail in court.

Meanwhile, others plan to pare back the power of the federal government via legislation. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) — who introduced the original case, Missouri v. Biden, as Missouri attorney general — promised he will use his role as a legislator “to dismantle every last facet of the Biden administration’s censorship industrial complex.”

“The First Amendment is first for a reason, and the freedom of expression should be protected from any infringement by the government,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in a statement emailed to The Washington Stand. He promised to back the Censorship Accountability Act (H.R. 4848), which allows U.S. citizens to sue any federal employee (except the president and vice president) who pressures social media companies to crack down on their posts.

“This kind of bureaucratic power shouldn’t be in the executive branch in the first place. There’s no substitute for ending the power of random bureaucrats to be the change they want to see in the world,” said Casey Mattox, a constitutional lawyer who serves as vice president for legal and judicial strategy at Americans for Prosperity.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the critics of the COVID regime targeted by the campaign, said, “This now also becomes a key issue in the upcoming election. Where do the presidential candidates stand on social media censorship? We know where Biden stands since his lawyers argue that he has near monarchical power over social media speech.”

“The Supreme Court got it wrong – and has failed to uphold its responsibility to the Constitution by finding no standing in Murthy v. Missouri,” said Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Justice Alito’s dissent outlines the correct analysis, finding standing and First Amendment violations on the merits. I will continue to fight for free speech in the courts and on the campaign trail.”

“Let’s make it a political liability to favor censorship,” Bhattacharya concluded.