Judges Are Playing 'Calvinball' With the Constitution Because They're Mad Trump was Banned from Twit

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.thedailybeast.com/judges-are-playing-calvinball-with-the-constitution-because-theyre-mad-trump-was-banned-from-twitter

No paywall
https://archive.ph/ege8Z

A panel of judges in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has decided that “editorial discretion” is no longer a protected right under the First Amendment—because the judges are upset that Donald Trump was removed from Twitter.

I know that sounds impossible, but it’s exactly what happened.

“[T]he Supreme Court’s cases do not carve out ‘editorial discretion’ as a special category of First-Amendment-protected expression,” the court said, opening up a pandora’s box of potential mischief.

The ruling is fractally wrong in the most frustrating ways. Just to understand any part of why it’s wrong, we could explore multiple layers of wrongness before even getting to why the final pronouncements in this ruling are wrong. (Writing this article is a struggle, as for each paragraph I was tempted to write an entire separate article detailing the underlying wrongness, but we only have so much space.)

SO, SO VERY WRONG

An astoundingly incomplete list of problems with the majority opinion include: it’s wrong about how the First Amendment works and the extent of what it protects; it gets so twisted up in its own made-up logic that it pretends the First Amendment limits private actors, rather than governments; it is so confused by how Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act actually works that the judge rewrites the law to say something it does not; bizarrely, it pretends that a law the court itself misrepresents (Section 230) is somehow relevant to the interpretation of the Constitution (which is not how anything works); it adds an element to the law it is analyzing that literally does not exist; it wholly ignores vital Supreme Court precedents; it pretends the plaintiffs waived a key argument they explicitly did not; it invents elements of common carrier law that do not exist; and it ignores the dormant commerce clause of the Constitution, which limits states’ ability to regulate interstate commerce.

*snip*

[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. The GOP, Federalist Society, Moscow Mitch, and trump conspired to damage our Judiciary.

There are malignant tumors within the Judiciary branch that are going to damage whole swaths of established law, now that they have an Extreme Court at the top of the appeals process.

[Kaleva]

2. These judges seem to be more aligned with McConnell then TFG.