From CAIR-Foundation, Inc. v. DeSantis, decided yesterday by Judge Mark Walker (N.D. Fla.); the analysis seems correct to me:
The question before this Court is whether the Governor can, in a non-emergency situation, unilaterally designate one of the largest Muslim civil rights groups in America as a "terrorist organization" and withhold government benefits from anyone providing material support or resources to the group. This Court finds he cannot…. The Governor's decree coerces third parties, under threat of losing government benefits, to disassociate from the Council on American-Islamic Relations ("CAIR"), thereby closing avenues of expression and suppressing CAIR's protected speech….
On December 8, 2025, Governor Desantis signed Executive Order 25-244 titled "Protecting Floridians from Radical Islamic Terrorist Organizations" (the "EO"). The EO designates CAIR as a terrorist organization and prevents CAIR or "any person known to have provided material support or resources" to CAIR "from receiving any contract, employment, funds, or other benefit or privilege" from executive or cabinet agencies or from any county or municipality of the state….
Where a government uses the "threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion … to achieve the suppression" of disfavored speech, it functionally creates "a system of prior administrative restraints" that bears "a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity." Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan (1963). A government official "cannot do indirectly what [he] is barred from doing directly: … coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on [his] behalf." Nat'l Rifle Ass'n v. Vullo (2024). The present case bears all the hallmarks of unconstitutional coercion that the Supreme Court identified in Bantam Books and Vullo….
Defendant's EO threatens those who platform, collaborate with, or otherwise provide support to Plaintiff. The "vice of the system" here is the same one the Supreme Court proscribed in Bantam Books. There, threats and coercion subjected the distribution of publications "to a system of prior administrative restraints" untethered from any procedural safeguards. [A state commission had threatened bookstores with prosecution if they continued to distribute certain books that the commission had found "objectionable." -EV] By imposing the specter of punishment on intermediary book distributors, the state "directly and designedly stopped the circulation of publications in many parts of" the state. This case is no different.
