by Andrea Widburg
American Thinker
In 2001, Barack Obama said something interesting about the Constitution. It was, he said, “a charter of negative liberties” setting out what the government cannot do. That’s a very peculiar formulation because, rather than seeing the Constitution from the people’s viewpoint as a leash on tyranny, he saw it from the government’s viewpoint as an irritating restraint on its power. Today, when the Supreme Court heard oral argument in a pivotal free speech case arising from the government’s pressure on social media during COVID, Ketanji Brown Jackson made the same point, only more explicitly. These people really hate that you have the right to talk back.
The case is Murthy v. Missouri. Multiple plaintiffs (state attorneys general and “epidemiologists, consumer and human rights advocates, academics, and media operators”) filed suit complaining that the government did indirectly that which it cannot do directly: Namely, it censored them, not by using its direct police power, but by putting pressure on social media outlets to censor any speech that ran counter to the government’s preferred COVID narrative (i.e., lockdowns, masks and, above all, forced vaccinations):