Court gives RFK Jr. green light to sue Biden-Harris admin over censorship
A federal court rekindled hopes this week that the Biden-Harris administration could be held accountable over its efforts to have critics censored during the pandemic,
ruling that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Children’s Health Defense, an organization he leads, have Article III standing to sue.
The U.S. Supreme Court let the Democratic administration off the hook in June for its
well-documented efforts to shut down critics of its COVID-19 policies and preferred narratives during the pandemic — policies and narratives that have been shown in the years since to have been in many cases unfounded and/or destructive.
The court’s
6-3 ruling in Murthy v. Biden asserted that the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with other plaintiffs, lacked standing to sue the Democratic administration.
‘There is a substantial risk that he will suffer similar injury in the near future.’
Although the plaintiffs in
Murthy were ultimately tripped up — a decision Justice Samuel Alito indicated the country might come to regret — theirs had a companion case that still had legs: Kennedy v. Biden.
U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana, whose injunction the SCOTUS reversed in
Murthy, gave Kennedy the green light Tuesday to run down the Democratic administration in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
“The Court finds that Kennedy is likely to succeed on his claim that suppression of content posted was caused by actions of Government Defendants, and there is a substantial risk that he will suffer similar injury in the near future,” wrote Doughty.
In February, Doughty, a Trump-nominated judge,
granted Kennedy an injunction blocking elements of the Biden-Harris administration, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI, from coercing social media companies to engage in suppression or outright censorship of content containing free speech.
This injunction was, however, put on hold pending the Supreme Court’s
Murthy ruling.
Following the SCOTUS’ June 26 decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals
kicked the case back to the district court, affording it an opportunity to reconsider Kennedy’s standing, admitting also that he may have stronger grounds.
‘This means the Biden-Harris Administration may finally be held accountable for its censorship.’
With the ball back in his court, Doughty noted that Kennedy was “identified as a member of the so-called ‘Disinformation Dozen,’ which was made up of twelve individuals that the Government specifically targeted for spreading alleged disinformation regarding COVID-19.”
The judge indicated that elements of the Biden-Harris administration “specifically targeted” Kennedy. After all, he dared hold “positions contrary to Government positions on COVID-19, including
mask mandates, vaccine mandates, vaccine injuries, lockdowns, etc.”
Doughty wrote:
There is ample evidence in the record showing that Kennedy has been directly censored in the past. Not only was he a part of the alleged ‘Disinformation Dozen,’ which was repeatedly flagged and/or censored at the behest of numerous Defendants, but he was also censored for his anti-vaccine and anti-COVID-19 rhetoric. Therefore, Kennedy has more than satisfied the first element for Article III standing, that is, he suffered an injury-in-fact when he was censored.
According to the judge, Kennedy’s presidential candidacy and political ambitions put him at further risk for future injury, raising the hypothetical of the FBI working in concert with private and governmental outfits to censor campaign-related information deemed “misinformation.”
Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD general counsel, told the defender in a statement, “Judge Terry Doughty carefully and clearly analyzed the law and facts and applied the framework from the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Murthy v. Missouri regarding standing.”
“GREAT NEWS!” Children’s Health Defense
tweeted. “This means the Biden-Harris Administration may finally be held accountable for its censorship of us via #BigTech.”
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