By contemporary political standards, the phrase "Let's Go Brandon," a mocking reference to former President Joe Biden, is pretty mild. But officials at Tri County Middle School in Howard City, Michigan, deemed it intolerable when it was displayed on sweatshirts that two students—a sixth-grader and his brother, an eighth-grader—had received as Christmas gifts from their mother. By requiring the boys to remove their sweatshirts, their mother argued in a 2023 lawsuit, the school violated their First Amendment rights.
Not so, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled this month in B.A. v. Tri County Schools, "because the school reasonably understood the slogan 'Let's Go Brandon' to be vulgar." Judge John K. Bush vigorously disagreed. "If we allow schools the power to censor political speech by recharacterizing it as vulgarity," he warns in his dissent, "we risk turning disagreement with political speech into justification for its censorship—something the First Amendment flatly forbids."
