First, a summary of where we are: After the Supreme Court remanded the case back to the district court for further proceedings, the judge asked the parties to brief him on whether the case should continue given the standing requirement leveled by the Supreme Court.
I would also like to bring attention to his choice of words here because he talks about a bit of a troll -- "burdened by what has been..."
The judge here makes clear that SCOTUS was applying a tougher version of standing doctrine, which needed to be granted a preliminary injunction, than what is needed to continue a case. The SCOTUS version of standing was absolutely ABSURD and has been discussed at length. If you are new to this groundbreaking censorship case, I will share my master thread at the end. I have been on this story for years.
The version of standing SCOTUS applied was not necessarily fatal to the case as a whole - just to the preliminary injunction.
At this point, the court needs to decide whether limited discovery intended for the Plaintiff to prove they have standing is warranted. This means that they will be granted the ability to grab more information to prove that they were harmed by the parties they think harmed them. Frivolous cases wouldn't be granted this opportunity. This isn't a frivolous case.
When the briefs were filed by Plaintiffs showing the judge why they were owed this additional discovery, they included even more evidence than the original arguments had, because we got more evidence, including the letter from Meta. The judge references that here, with the judge saying it provides "sufficient smoke for the plaintiffs to go and find the fire"
Here, the judge lays out some careful guidelines for Plaintiffs addressing declarations - stating that since the government basically holds the keys to providing the evidence of their wrongdoing, the only possible way to prove their standing viability is via discovery - again - this is for standing not merit - and this is what the judge is warning about here. They can't necessarily go on a fact-finding mission but can seek to determine that the Plaintiffs were directly targeted.
Then the judge hits us with some real crazy - the admin is changing, and one of the plaintiffs IN THE SUIT may end up being IN CHARGE of a bureaucracy that sought to harm him... (RFK) Talk about insane.
And so, for these reasons, the case of Missouri v. Biden lives to see yet another bout of discovery - discovery that will likely gladly be provided by an incoming Trump administration which has promised to get to the bottom of government censorship through coercion, ala Twitter files. It is a great day in America.
