Two more opinions

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Up next, the Supreme Court handed down two opinions yesterday. Here’s WORLD Legal affairs reporter Mary Reichard:

MARY REICHARD: The first decision yesterday came down in Murthy v. Missouri. It’s a loss for those who challenged the federal government for pressuring social media platforms to remove posts it deemed false…particularly about COVID and the 2020 election.

A majority six justices across ideological lines said the challengers lacked standing to sue.

I called up the firm that represented four individual plaintiffs, New Civil Liberties Alliance. Lawyer John Vecchione:

VECCHIONE: It is not the end. The good news is this was just on standing for an injunction.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, said the platforms had independent incentive to moderate content, aside from government pressure. She wants challengers to show more specifics… as to time and place of each claimed infringement.

Lawyer Vecchionne is skeptical:

VECCHIONE: The unreality of the opinion that all this government apparatus, which they admit was designed to get messages the government didn't like off social media, somehow had no effect. They were useless government actions, apparently. And you know, maybe there are a lot of useless government actions, but this one had results.

This case isn’t over, though.

VECCHIONE: We've got to go back. We've got to get more discovery. We have to lay out our timeline, and we have to bring this case forward so that even someone trying to protect the government and not the First Amendment rights of Americans won't be able to.

The second opinion released yesterday is a victory for the former mayor of Portage, Indiana who’d been convicted of bribery five years ago. Then-Mayor Jim Snyder had accepted $13,000 from a trucking company after it was awarded a lucrative city contract on Snyder’s watch.

Snyder argued it was merely for “services rendered,” like a tip, not a qui pro quo.

The court agreed on the basis of a vaguely written statute.

You can hear the winning argument in this comment from Justice Brett Kavanaugh during oral argument in April:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: …when you put “corruptly” in, now you don’t know where the line is. You don’t know if the concert tickets, the game tickets, the gift card to Starbucks, whatever, where is the line, and so there’s vagueness. That creates the problem that there is here.

In dissent, liberal justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan chided the majority. Quoting now: “Snyder's absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today's Court could love."

But the majority points out that Congress can fix this problem if it wants to.

Case remanded to comport with the decision.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Reichard.

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