Democrats are able to play dumb about the censorship-industrial complex in part because Barrett’s decision gives them the ammunition to claim it doesn’t exist.
Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., quoted Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s disastrous decision in a would-be landmark speech-censorship case in order to argue that the federal government was not engaged in mass censorship of conservatives.
During the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on The Constitution hearing, Welch said the Supreme Court “rejected the allegation that government had unconstitutionally censored conservatives by pressuring social media companies to take down posts.”
“That was a 6-3 decision by Judge Amy Coney Barrett that found no merits to the claims. Justice Barrett wrote, ‘It’s therefore difficult to say that the White House was responsible (even in part),’” he added.
That decision, Murthy v. Missouri, was written by Barrett to absolve the federal government of any wrongdoing in coercing social media organizations to censor disfavored speech about the coronavirus pandemic — despite the “vast” sea of evidence to the contrary, as Justice Samuel Alito wrote in dissent.
The opinion punted the issue of coercion and censorship by finding that plaintiffs had a lack of standing to sue, refusing to address the merits or evidence clearly showing a vast censorship regime at work to downgrade conservative or otherwise inconvenient points of view.
Welch denied that the government was involved in such censorship....
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