A Federal judge is set to rule on former Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s social media censorship lawsuit.
Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry originally filed the lawsuit in May 2022.
On May 26, the parties argued for more than four hours over a preliminary injunction (PI) that if granted will prevent the White House from demanding, urging, encouraging, pressuring, coercing, deceiving, colluding with, or otherwise inducing social media companies to censor speech on their platforms.
“The judge is going to think long and hard about how to frame any preliminary relief that he might give the plaintiffs to make sure that it accords with the requirements of the Rules of Procedure but I think that the hearing went well,” said Zhonette Brown, senior litigation counsel with New Civil Liberties Alliance. “We're optimistic.”
As previously reported in the St. Louis Record, Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry Doughty, who is presiding over the case, denied the federal government’s motion to dismiss Schmitt’s lawsuit.
But for now, the litigation is at a standstill as the parties wait for a ruling on the PI.
“We're waiting to see, essentially if we're going to be able to focus on the discovery and moving the case forward, or if we prevail and the government's going to try to divert action to the court of appeals,” Brown told the St. Louis Record. “We won't be terribly surprised if the government tries to appeal the preliminary injunction so then it's a question of division of labor and resources.”
Since Schmitt was elected to the U.S. Senate, his replacement, Attorney General Andrew Bailey, has taken over the case.
“Even if the judge rules against us, which we don't expect, the case continues,” Brown said in an interview. “We still get to discovery and briefing on the merits. There will be additional depositions and more discovery of third parties, including the social media companies and others, to fill in some of the gaps and bolster our evidence even further.”
Brown appeared at the hearing on behalf of plaintiffs Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, Jayanta Bhattacharya, Jill Hines, and Martin Kulldorff.
In its defense, the government filed a 277-page brief and a 700-page long brief.
“The judge was looking collectively at thousands of pages,” Brown added. “The government's lead argument in the hearing actually was that most of this conduct is well in the past, some of these people are no longer with the government and the plaintiffs haven't shown that they will suffer harm in the next 18 months until we get to a trial or a ruling on the merits.”