The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case involving public school students who were banned from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts to class because officials said the slogan was vulgar.
Lower courts had agreed with the Tri County Area School District in Michigan, finding that although the words included no explicit profanity, the intent of the words was vulgar.
The slogan had become an equivalent of saying “f—- Joe Biden.”
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The high court did not offer a reason for refusing the appeal, and no justice noted a dissent. The appeal was rejected, along with dozens of other cases that had piled up during the high court’s summer vacation.
Other rejections included the Justice Department’s request to restore a case against a man convicted of methamphetamine use, and a case involving whether an Alabama judge tainted a capital murder case by scaring jurors, after he arrested a juror who was 30 minutes late for court one day.
In the Brandon case, the two brothers who had tried to wear the sweatshirts to their middle school argued that the clothing did not cross any lines or cause any disruption at school.
That, the boys’ attorneys argued, should have been the key test for limiting students’ First Amendment rights regarding political speech.
School officials argued that “almost all lewd speech” comes in coded phrases, and they said “Let’s Go Brandon” was clear to all in the school as a substitute for the F-word.
In their filing with the justices, they said students should be better behaved.
“Sixth-graders should not flout their disagreements with teachers, students or politicians by telling them to go f—- themselves,” the school system argued.
With the justices’ refusal, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision stands.
In that 2-1 ruling, Judge John Nalbandian, a Trump appointee, said the vulgarity of the speech was the crucial factor.
“In the schoolhouse, vulgarity trumps politics,” he wrote.
Judge John Bush, another Trump appointee, dissented.
He said his colleagues were treating the use of the F-word as a sexual reference rather than a political reference.
“If we allow schools the power to censor political speech by recharacterizing it as vulgarity, we risk turning disagreement with political speech into justification for its censorship — something the First Amendment flatly forbids,” he wrote.
The Brandon phraseology developed in 2021 when fans at a NASCAR race at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama were chanting the actual F-word attack on President Biden, but NBC Sports reporter Kelli Stavast, who was interviewing driver Brandon Brown, misheard them and said on air they were chanting “Let’s Go Brandon.”
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