Two Michigan middle-school brothers who were told to remove their hoodies bearing the message “Let’s Go Brandon” have asked the Supreme Court to hear their case.
“The siblings are represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression which says the boys’ school violated their First Amendment rights,” notes The College Fix. “The phrase was popularized during a 2021 NASCAR event when a crowd was shouting ‘F*** Joe Biden!’ but the NBC interviewer told racer Brandon Brown they were yelling ‘Let’s go Brandon!'”
A federal district judge ruled two years ago that the phrase could “reasonably be interpreted” as profane.
In October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld that ruling in a 2-1 decision, saying the sweatshirt was unprotected in school under the “the vulgarity exception” to the First Amendment that the Supreme Court previously created for speech in K-12 schools in its 1986 decision in Bethel School District v. Fraser.
Appeals court judge John Nalbandian wrote that “The Constitution doesn’t hamstring school administrators when they are trying to limit profanity and vulgarity in the classroom during school hours [… schools are not] powerless to prevent student speech that the administrators reasonably understand to be profane or vulgar.”
The courts have also recognized a “disruption” exception to the First Amendment for student speech that disrupts school activities, or poses a high risk of creating a disruption. But the school principal conceded that “was not aware that the school had experienced any disruption from students wearing ‘Let’s Go Brandon’” sweatshirts.
FIRE lawyer Conor Fitzpatrick says it is vital for the Supreme Court to hear the case, and that the “school district’s censorship assumes that students cannot handle seeing even sanitized expressions. But America’s next generation is not so fragile, and the First Amendment is not so brittle.”
