In the wake of a Supreme Court ruling siding with the Biden administration on how it can communicate with social media, Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., said the case was a "huge win for Americans."
Schmitt filed the original lawsuit against the Biden administration when he was state attorney general, in a case that morphed into Murthy v. Missouri.
In a 6-3 decision, court declined to impose limits on the way President Joe Biden's administration may communicate with social media platforms, rejecting a challenge made on free speech grounds to how officials encouraged the removal of posts deemed misinformation, including about elections and COVID.
Despite the loss, Schmitt said he was proud to file the original suit.
"It exposed nearly every part of the Biden administration's vast ‘censorship enterprise," Schmitt said. "Many knew that censorship was happening before this case, but Missouri v. Biden and later Murthy v. Missouri broke the dam wide open and showed the entire world the lengths that the Biden administration and Democrats went to silence disfavored speech."
Schmitt said while this was not the outcome he was hoping for, the fight was far from over.
"I promise that I will never stop fighting to ensure that Americans' First Amendment rights are jealously guarded," Schmitt said. "I will continue to work to dismantle every last facet of the Biden administration's censorship industrial complex."
Missouri and Louisiana sued officials and agencies across the federal government, including in the White House, FBI, surgeon general's office, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The Supreme Court, in the ruling authored by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, decided the plaintiffs did not have the required legal standing to sue the administration in federal court. The court's decision overturns a ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which sided with the plaintiffs.
The plaintiffs could not show a "concrete link" between the conduct by the officials and any harm that the plaintiffs suffered, Barrett wrote.
Conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
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