This week, Sen. Eric Schmitt’s Missouri v. Biden case delivered an incredible, long-awaited victory and yet another step toward ensuring that the Biden administration’s wretched free speech abuses never happen again.
“We just won Missouri v. Biden,” Schmitt announced on X Tuesday, referring to a case he brought against the Biden administration for “brazenly colluding with Big Tech” to censor speech. The courts resolved the case with a 10-year consent decree that will restrict the surgeon general, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from threatening and coercing Big Tech Companies to censor users.
“[N]o more threats of legal, regulatory, or economic punishment. No more coercion. No more unilateral direction or veto of platform decisions to remove, suppress, deplatform, or algorithmically bury protected speech,” Schmitt wrote.
MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider praised Schmitt in an X post, saying that through this case, the senator “saved the First Amendment.” Schneider also pointed out how crucial the consent decree truly is.
“By resolving this fight by a ‘consent decree,’ the radical left will be unable to attack it, reverse it, or ignore it. The left is constantly seeking to censor MORE speech while the right tries to protect First Amendment free speech rights. The use of consent decrees is a tactic perfected by the left, but not used effectively by the right ... until now”
The Missouri v. Biden case — substantially bolstered by the Media Research Center’s work — has been a long time coming.
For years, Americans saw Big Tech companies removing content and “censoring the truth about COVID[-19], the Hunter Biden laptop, the open border, and the 2020 election,” Schmitt described. Thanks to his case, the Twitter Files and evidence MRC brought to light, Americans now know that the Biden administration and various government agencies were silencing their opponents behind the scenes.
“They tried to turn Facebook, X, YouTube, and the rest into their private speech police, labeling dissent ‘misinformation’ while they pushed their narrative on the American people,” Schmitt wrote.
In his early ruling on a preliminary injunction for the plaintiffs, U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty summed up the severity of censorship and the urgency for a solution when he wrote, “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” [Emphasis added].
This is also one of the largest nails in the coffin of Joe Biden’s war on free speech, detailed in MRC’s report on the former president’s 57 Censorship Initiatives. The MRC report even highlighted that when the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court, Biden’s Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar “claimed administration officials were entitled to secretly threaten Big Tech platforms with adverse regulatory action if they did not censor Biden’s political opponents.”
In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court previously denied the plaintiffs an injunction that would have halted social media companies’ ability to censor at the request of government officials during the legal proceedings. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, stated that the complainants lacked standing to file an “injunction against any defendant” because they failed to demonstrate “particularized” harm.
While the Trump administration has worked to dismantle many of these initiatives through executive orders and by restructuring the administrative state, this consent decree is one of the few measures that will assuredly outlast the Trump administration.
As Schmitt described it, “This is the first real, operational restraint on the federal censorship machine. It locks in the First Amendment principle we fought for: modern technology doesn’t erase your rights, and government labels don’t strip speech of protection. The deep state just got checked.” [Emphasis added].
