The Constitution is a document that limits Government behavior. If the government cannot conduct a warrantless search of Joe Citizen’s home, it certainly cannot twist the arm of Joe’s landlord to do the search as its proxy. Friday SCOTUS signaled its not too sure about that.

In this instance, SCOTUS is putting a hold on July’s decision by Federal Judge Terry Doughty to bar Federal officials from pressuring or threatening social media platforms into censoring protected free speech.

The Supreme Court on Friday blocked in full a lower court ruling that would have curbed the Biden administration’s ability to communicate with social media companies about contentious content on such issues as Covid-19.

The decision in a short unsigned order puts on hold a Louisiana-based judge’s ruling in July that specific agencies and officials should be barred from meeting with companies to discuss whether certain content should be stifled.

The Supreme Court also agreed to immediately take up the government’s appeal, meaning it will hear arguments and issue a ruling on the merits in its current term, which runs until the end of June.

The Deep State has worried about the Internet for decades. How dare so many ‘little people’ be allowed a large soap box in the town square outside the scope of their control? Even the early days of blogging, people who decided to opine on things outside of recipes, pets and kids, could tick off the wrong people and suddenly their hosting company kicked them to the curb. When platforms like Facebook came along to settle the wild-west blogosphere, people noticed certain patterns of what one could share or not.

So color all of us unsurprised by seeing censorship of un-woke commentary confirmed. Whether it was the Facebook interference in 2020 or the damning Twitter files in regards to shutting out the New York Post’s story on Hunter’s laptop … the government’s fingerprints were quite visible on the knives pulled out to gain compliance from BigTech … or else.

As Judge Alito (writing the dissent for himself and Judges Thomas and Gorsuch) states:

Despite the Government’s conspicuous failure to establish a threat of irreparable harm, the majority stays the injunction and thus allows the defendants to persist in committing the type of First Amendment violations that the lower courts identified. The majority takes this action in the face of the lower courts’ detailed findings of fact. But “[w]here an intermediate court reviews, and affirms, a trial court’s factual findings, this Court will not ‘lightly overturn’ the concurrent findings of the two lower courts.” (snip)

At this time in the history of our country, what the Court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the Government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news. That is most unfortunate.

We’ve seen Western governments go bold in their use of power over citizens who dare dissent. Whether it was Trudeau’s unprecedented freezing of the bank accounts of citizens who gave money to protesting truckers or in England where Nigel Farge and his family have been refused to have any bank accounts anywhere … in our age of Internet everything, to allow Government to go all nice place ya got here … Tony Sporano on ostensible private companies who hesistate to do the government’s [illegal] bidding is frightening and dangerous.

Arrogance has a name and it is Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar who wrote in opposition to Judge Doughty’s injunction:

“The court imposed unprecedented limits on the ability of the President’s closest aides to use the bully pulpit to address matters of public concern,

If there are issues that are a matter of public concern, then take them to the public. Here we have civil service crapweasels contacting businesses to bully them to punish the public behind their backs.

Some pulpit, eh?

And now, in the run up to the 2024 election, Biden and cronies are free to move about the cabin and recommence threatening social media platforms and media who don’t comply with their censorship demands.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers!

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