SCOTUS Won't Take On Parent Protest Lawsuit

You will recall, back what seems like a thousand years, folks like Chris Rufo whipped some counter-factual frenzies about the supposed presence of Critical Race Theory in public schools, with a side of masking and LGBTQ panic for good measure. 

This led to some parents absolutely going off the rails in school board meetings. This in turn led to a bunch of school board members (who in the majority of districts are simply citizen volunteers who did not sign up expecting violence and death threats) getting scared and sending up flares for help. Which led to the National School Boards Association asking the Biden administration for some kind of help.

That request included the unfortunate choice to liken the most extreme protestors to "domestic terrorists." The NSBA backed that bus right up and apologized, but anti-public school folks smelled blood and decided to press on the attack. In the process, folks on the right sort of fuzzied up the use of the phrase "domestic terrorists" so that in many retellings, it was Merrick Garland who was using it, even as he sicced the Department of Justice on parents just trying to exercise their First Amendment rights.

That counterfactual narrative was useful for stirring up outrage, and that in turn led to a lawsuit back in 2022. The plaintiffs were an assortment of parents from Loudon, VA, and Saline, MI, and the law firm was the American Freedom Law Center, a Christian conservative shop that proudly went to fight against "lawfare."

The suit itself was not based on actual reality. In their press release about the suit, AFLC charged the "AG has pejoratively designated these parents and private citizens as ‘threats’ and ‘domestic terrorists,’" (he hadn't) and "that he was calling upon the FBI and federal prosecutors to use the overwhelming power of the federal government’s criminal justice system to target those parents who dare to publicly criticize the local school boards that are indoctrinating their children with a harmful and radical left-wing agenda disguised as school curricula" (nope, just the violent and death-threaty ones).

The plaintiffs kept losing all the way up to the Supremes, and I suppose they had reason to be hopeful, given that SCOTUS has been willing to overlook facts in order to hand victories to christianist folks before. 

But the Supremes passed on this appeal, so the lower court ruling stands, despite arguments citing authorities like an article in the Washington Examiner. The arguments for the AG pointed out some of the holes in the case.

Petitioners only have standing to sue if they show that Garland's memorandum targeted actions they were expecting to take. The memorandum was very clear that it was focused on "threats of violence and similar unlawful conduct." So unless the petitioners intended to break the law as their way of complaining, the memorandum had nothing to do with them. 

At no point does the AG actually call the petitioners "domestic terrorists." To that point, "Neither the Attorney General’s memorandum nor the FBI email refers to petitioners at all, much less brands them with any labels."

Some of the government's arguments are disingenuous, like the "just because we're collecting information and making files, that shouldn't be intimidating anyone." But there is also the reality of what happened next. The DOJ received (as of March of 2023) 22 reports of threats against school officials, and only six of those were referred to local authorities. So the massive crackdown on parents who just wanted to yell at board members about CRT programs never happened. Kind of like the Obama then Biden program to take away everyone's guns. 

At any rate, it looks like maybe this particular legal flap is over and done with.