WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court refused on Monday to hear a case from parents in Virginia and Michigan who argued the Justice Department targeted them for protesting at school board meetings.
At the heart of the dispute was a 2021 memo Attorney General Merrick Garland aimed at combatting “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.” The memo setting up meetings with state and local law enforcement agencies sought to “discourage these threats, identify them when they occur and prosecute them when appropriate.”
Some parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, and Saline, Michigan, challenged the policy in federal court by arguing it targeted them for protesting school policies under their First Amendment rights. But judges on the District and Circuit Courts rejected their arguments.
Now the Supreme Court has refused to hear the case.
The showdown over school board meetings came after several high-profile confrontations over COVID-19 policies for wearing masks or getting vaccinated. Conservative newspapers reported that Garland’s memo came after a National School Boards Association letter to the White House called school protesters “domestic terrorists. “The group later apologized.
Garland’s memo became a lightning rod for conservative lawmakers who held hearings asking whether prosecutors and the FBI were targeting parents for voicing their concerns. Lawmakers noted the FBI created “threat tags” to track investigations authorized by the directive.
A ‘rogue policy designed to intimidate parent protestors’
In their legal challenges, parents who said they were at the epicenter of peaceful protests argued the threat of prosecution chilled their free speech and they were harmed by being labeled domestic terrorists.
“The alleged facts, taken together, present a ‘plausible’ narrative of a rogue policy designed to intimidate and silence parent protestors at school board meetings,” said the parents’ lawyers Robert Muise and David Yerushalmi.
But Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress they were targeting violence or the threat of violence rather than just speaking at school board meetings. By March 2023, Garland said federal authorities received 22 reports and referred six cases to state and local authorities to investigate.
Is a spirited debate about policy protected by the Constitution?
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said in a legal filing the lower courts rejected the lawsuit because parents weren’t prosecuted for peaceful protests and the police didn’t call them domestic terrorists.
“Moreover, the memorandum here makes clear that ‘spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution,’ and that the memorandum was addressed only to ‘the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel,” Prelogar wrote.
