This July Fourth there was special reason to celebrate. Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden, which stands to become one of the most important free-speech cases in the nation’s history.

At stake is the federal government’s use of social-media platforms to censor Americans. Officials kept most of their censorship regime secret through two election cycles. Discovery in Missouri v. Biden, however, revealed extensive evidence of government coercion and encouragement of censorship. It is the most massive assault on free speech in the nation’s history. …

Judge Doughty could have dismissed the case without an opportunity for discovery, as another judge did in another NCLA case, Changizi v. HHS, involving the same sort of censorship. Judge Doughty understood, however, that a largely secret censorship system can’t be evaluated under the First Amendment until after discovery.

[This is a critical point, one that may have been a bit lost given all of the attention paid to the Twitter Files. The AGs of Missouri and Louisiana did the hard work of fighting to get discovery and produce those communications in a court-admissible fashion, and not just in relation to Twitter. The plaintiffs in Changizi v HHS are appealing the dismissal to the Sixth Circuit, by the way. This case might eclipse their complaint, or Doughty’s findings might convince that panel that this case needs to be revisited by the trial court, which dismissed the suit over standing, but also thought that the Surgeon General had the authority to censor what he determines as “misinformation” about COVID-19, pp 35-36. — Ed]