U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty denied the Department of Justice’s request to lift the injunction banning Biden Administration agencies and employees from speaking with social media companies —but then Joe & Co. filed an emergency appeal!
The Biden Administration filed an emergency stay with the 5th U.S. District Court of Appeals to temporarily suspend Doughty’s decision —a decision that protects free speech.
From Fox News:
The request came shortly after U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty rejected the Biden administration’s request to stay his own order – which he issued July 4 – while they pursue an appeal. That order came in a lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, as well as a conservative website owner and four individual critics of government COVID-19 policies.
The lawsuit claimed the administration, in effect, censored free speech by using threats of regulatory action or protection while pressuring companies to remove what it deemed misinformation.
The lawsuit spotlighted such topics as COVID-19 vaccines, legal issues involving President Biden’s son Hunter and election fraud allegations.
Doughty’s injunction blocked the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI and multiple other government agencies and administration officials from meeting with or contacting social media companies for the purpose of “encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
“Defendants do not identify any specific conduct that they claim is lawful but prevented by the injunction,” Doughty said in Monday’s ruling, before the emergency appeal.
Last week, Doughty said “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history. In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the Federal Government, and particularly the Defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”
“Viewpoint discrimination is an especially egregious form of content discrimination,” Doughty argued. “The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.”
