No joke: Supreme Court case could take a big bite out of the First Amendment

My favorite thing in this article is the link to the Amicus Curiae brief that The Onion filed with the Supreme Court:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-293/242596/2022... [PDF]

The brief begins:

> The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.

Sure, it could.

Lawsuits are filed all the time. The people who lose those suits sometimes appeal. Sometimes they appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. When they go that far with a suit that has no constitutional ground for even being heard, they have to come up with some, um, novel constitutional question in order to even make it in the door. Otherwise, the Supreme Court won't hear the suit, leaving their loss at the Appellate level intact. This happens somewhat regularly.

What's much more rare is for the novel re-interpretation of the Constitution to gain enough traction for the Supreme Court to replace the existing, standard interpretation.

The headline said "could". And that's right, it could, at least in theory. It won't, though.