Trump’s Plan to Make Google News Search “Illegal” Is … Illegal. So Says a 9-0 Supreme Court

President Trump has tweeted this morning that Google news searches are possibly “illegal” because they are “RIGGED” (caps in original tweet) so that almost all stories about him are “bad.”

This brief post is to assure you that the president—and his advisors, who are looking into regulating Google searches— have no chance of succeeding.

The case on point is Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union (1997).

In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act. They sought to regulate online pornography. Specifically, the law sought to criminalize any party that “knowingly” sent anyone under 18 years of age content that displayed “any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or other communication that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs.”

Every federal judge who ruled on the case found the law unconstitutional.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for a 9-0 Supreme Court that struck down the law. He said: “It is true that we have repeatedly recognized the governmental interest in protecting children from harmful materials. But that interest does not justify an unnecessarily broad suppression of speech addressed to adults.”

That law addressed an understandable interest in shielding minors from graphic sexual content online. And the law was so completely overruled by federal judges that Congress could only claim to have scored a small point for trying to make the internet safer for kids.

President Trump’s tweets this morning are, of course, the stuff that only dictators propose. 
Be that as it may, it’s worth some time in the upcoming confirmation hearings to get Judge Kavanaugh on record about whether Reno v. ACLU should be overturned to enable a president—for whom he professes expansive powers— to regulate online searches for political purposes.