A group of middle school students in Michigan has taken their fight over "Let's Go Brandon" sweatshirts all the way to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to settle a deepening divide among federal appeals courts over when public schools can silence student speech they find distasteful.
The students, banned by Tri-County Area Schools from wearing the sweatshirts, petitioned SCOTUS to review a split decision by a panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling not only upheld the school's censorship but also created a circuit split, meaning federal courts around the country now apply fundamentally different rules to the same constitutional question.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, is representing the students. And the legal argument they're pressing cuts to the bone of First Amendment jurisprudence in public schools.
The entire point of "Let's Go Brandon" is that it's a sanitized expression. It exists precisely because the speaker chose not to use the vulgarity. That distinction matters legally, and it matters culturally. English speakers have been doing this for centuries.
As the petition noted:
"English speakers throughout history have turned to sanitized expressions to avoid the social taboo of profanity."
The petition even cited the 1884 Republican campaign slogan "Ma. Ma. Where's My Pa?", a jab at Democratic presidential candidate Grover Cleveland, who had a bastard child. Political speech has always been sharp-elbowed. The republic survived, as Just The News reports.
Yet Tri-County Area Schools treated a sweatshirt bearing a phrase critical of then-President Biden as though it were an obscenity. Sixth Circuit Judge John Bush, dissenting from the panel's ruling, saw this clearly, calling it a "political slogan critical of a president but containing no words that are vulgar or profane."
FIRE Supervising Senior Attorney Conor Fitzpatrick framed the school's position in stark terms:
"The school district's censorship assumes that students cannot handle seeing even sanitized expressions."
The school, in other words, punished students not for what they said but for what administrators imagined they meant.
The Supreme Court's student speech doctrine rests on a few landmark cases, from the foundational Tinker standard, which protects speech unless it causes substantial disruption, to the Fraser decision addressing "a rather elaborate sexual metaphor," to Morse, which "narrowly upheld" punishment for a student who unfurled a "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" banner during a Winter Olympics Torch Relay. That last case came 21 years after Fraser.
The problem is that lower courts have stretched these precedents into an incoherent patchwork. The petition describes the current framework as "ambiguously lewd, vulgar, or profane," a standard so elastic that it swallows nearly any speech a school administrator finds uncomfortable. FIRE called the resulting legal landscape "difficult and confusing, even for lawyers, law professors, and judges."
The 3rd and 9th Circuits apply one standard. The 6th Circuit now applies another. The 2nd Circuit, based in New York City, once upheld a school's discipline of a student for calling school officials "douchebags." The 1st Circuit approved a Massachusetts middle school's ban on shirts reading "Only Two Genders" and "Only Censored Genders." When SCOTUS refused to review that case, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas registered heated objections.
The petition put the stakes plainly:
"The Sixth Circuit's approach defies common sense."
And the students' proposed solution is straightforward. If speech is "plausibly interpreted as political or social commentary," it should receive protection. For genuinely disruptive speech, the Tinker standard already exists as what the petition calls a "circuit breaker, immediately available to teachers and administrators if expression causes, or is reasonably forecasted to cause, disruption, or invades the rights of others."
That is not radical. That is the system working as designed.
This is the core danger. When schools can suppress speech based on how an individual teacher feels about a phrase, the standard is no longer objective. It is a permission slip for ideological enforcement.
The petition quoted Judge Bush's dissent directly:
"As Judge Bush explained in dissent, subjective standards are a petri dish for viewpoint discrimination and thus anathema to the First Amendment."
Consider the pattern. "Let's Go Brandon" shirts: banned. "Only Two Genders" shirts: banned. These are expressions of mainstream conservative viewpoints, sanitized and nonviolent, suppressed by school administrators who happen to disagree with them. Meanwhile, the legal apparatus that enables this censorship remains conveniently flexible enough to protect speech that aligns with progressive orthodoxy.
The petition argues that the current regime "attempts to resuscitate the ironfisted authority over student speech that private school headmasters enjoyed in the 19th century." And then delivers the closing line that era deserves:
"That era is over."
Five months before the nation's largest federal appeals court affirmed the "Let's Go Brandon" censorship, a California school district was learning what happens when FIRE comes knocking from the other direction.
A student at Torrey Pines High School, part of the San Dieguito Union High School District, was suspended after distributing flyers that read "We ❤️ I.C.E. – Real Americans." Hundreds of students staged a walkout carrying posters in response. The school cited state law prohibiting speech that "incites pupils to create a clear and present danger," district policy against "conduct that creates a hostile or intimidating environment," and the Supreme Court's 1942 "fighting words" doctrine.
That is three separate legal justifications deployed against a student who expressed support for a federal law enforcement agency. The school also accused the student of "directing harassment, threats, or intimidation toward district staff or other students."
A flyer expressing support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now "harassment." In a public school. Funded by taxpayers.
The district backed down this week, expunging the suspension after FIRE's litigators made document requests and the family retained FIRE's litigation attorneys. The school folded rather than defend its position in court, which tells you everything about how confident it was in its own legal reasoning.
The 6th Circuit is, by one estimate, the second-most overturned federal appeals court in the country. That track record does not inspire confidence in its "Let's Go Brandon" ruling surviving serious scrutiny.
But this case is about more than one phrase on one sweatshirt in one Michigan school district. The petition frames the constitutional question in historical terms, asking how free speech rights were understood "at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment's ratification" and noting that the current framework treats public school interactions as something that "implicates direct, coercive interactions between the State and its young residents."
That framing matters. These are not private institutions exercising private judgment. These are government actors using government power to silence political speech by children. The petition makes clear that the standard should not depend on the sensitivities of individual teachers:
"Students' First Amendment rights do not and must not depend on the sensitivities of individual teachers."
The Supreme Court has a circuit split, a deeply flawed lower court framework, and a generation of students learning that the Bill of Rights applies everywhere except the hallway outside their locker. The petition offers the Court a "commonsense, workable approach" to fix it.
Whether the justices take it will say a great deal about whether student speech still means anything at all.
