Biden Administration Scores a Supreme Court Win

The remainder of the week will be big in terms of Supreme Court decisions, and Wednesday brought what CNN calls "a technical if important election-year victory" for the Biden administration. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court said the White House may continue to push social media companies to remove content the government considers misinformation. What you need to know:

• The immediate implications: CNN shares its take—that the decision means the Department of Homeland Security can keep flagging social media posts that it suspects were created by foreign agents who are trying to undermine the 2024 election.

• The nuts and bolts of the ruling: The justices opted not to consider the First Amendment questions at play but instead ruled that Missouri and Louisiana and the five social media users who brought the case didn't have legal standing to do so. Reuters reports the decision overturns a lower court's 2023 ruling that found some federal officials had likely run afoul of the First Amendment in pressuring companies like Facebook and X to remove posts that decried things like COVID lockdowns and the outcome of the Election 2020.
• From the majority opinion: "The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants' conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the years-long communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different conduct," Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote, per the Hill. "This Court's standing doctrine prevents us from 'exercising such general legal oversight' of other branches of Government."
• The dissent: Justice Samel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch, felt the plaintiffs did have standing and called the case "one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years." He wrote that the Court's decision "permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think. That is regrettable."
• A sidenote: Politico reports the case's timeline included "an unusual ruling" last summer, in which a federal judge in Louisiana issued an injunction that barred some federal officials, including all FBI agents, from discussing certain topics with social media companies. The Supreme Court intervened in October, putting a stop to the injunction after the White House argued it could put the public at risk by discouraging FBI agents from communication with the companies in any form.

(More US Supreme Court stories.)