MRC Free Speech America update summary: On Aug. 7, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order, "Guaranteeing Fair Banking For All Americans," which directs the Treasury to develop a strategy to combat politicized or unlawful debanking, “including consideration of legislative or regulatory options to eliminate such debanking." It further directs Federal banking regulators (the Small Business Administration) to do the following: "remove the use of reputation risk or equivalent concepts that could result in politicized or unlawful debanking;" to "identify and reinstate" or "identify" and provide notice to all previous clients denied access to "financial services" or "payment processing services," including as a result of "politicized or unlawful debanking action;" to "identify financial institutions" which have policies that "require, encourage or otherwise influence" politicization or unlawful banking and "take appropriate remedial action;" and to refer to the U.S. Attorney General "any financial institution" that is "unable to obtain compliance."
The following article is a supplement to the MRC Report: The Biden Administration Waged War on Free Speech with 57 Censorship Initiatives.
Initiative #40: The Rewriting of the First Amendment
Type of Censorship: Direct Action
Agencies Involved:
- Department of Justice
- Office of the Solicitor General
- Executive Office of the President
- White House Office
- President Joe Biden
- White House Office
Summary:
An MRC report detailed how, under President Joe Biden, the Office of the Solicitor General launched a four-year long campaign to get courts to rewrite the First Amendment so it would instead protect censorship and squash speech.
The Biden administration pushed its idea for a new, anti-free speech First Amendment in the following cases:
- NetChoice v. Paxton, where the administration asked the Supreme Court to nullify a Texas law by creating a new constitutional right to censor.
- Moody v. NetChoice, where the administration asked the Court to nullify a Florida statute which declined to exempt Big Tech companies like Google and Meta from having to disclose their censorship-related election expenditures.
- 303 Creative v. Elenis, where the administration claimed that a publisher could be mandated to engage in speech which violated her religion, even while Big Tech platforms were entitled to censor other people’s speech.
- NRA v. Vullo, where Biden’s solicitor general defended then-Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration’s explicit threats to financial institutions of negative retaliatory action if the institutions did not debank Biden’s political opponent.
- Murthy v. Missouri, where the solicitor general claimed administration officials were entitled to secretly threaten Big Tech platforms with adverse regulatory action if they did not censor Biden’s political opponents.
- Lindke v. Freed and O’Connor Ratcliff v. Garnier, where the Biden administration argued that government officials had a right to personally ban individual Americans’ access to official public statements and even public hearings and events, so long as said events were held on a Big Tech platform.
Key Individuals:
- Joe Biden, President of the United States
- Brian Fletcher, Deputy Solicitor General
- Merrick Garland, Attorney General
- Masha Hansford, Assistant Solicitor General
- Sopan Joshi, Assistant Solicitor General
- Ephraim McDowell, Assistant Solicitor General
- Elizabeth Prelogar, Solicitor General
