In the worldview of the majority of Supreme Court justices, the police power of a state is so strong that the state can employ it to destroy anyone’s life for not injecting a dangerous therapeutic into his body. That is essentially the upshot of two years’ worth of decisions from all the justices not named Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch regarding COVID mandates on one’s person.

Yet these same judges now believe that a state is powerless to regulate public common carriers that have a monopoly over the flow of information and stop them from completely tilting our elections to one side and boxing out one point of view and the candidates representing it from today’s public square.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court voted to reverse the Fifth Circuit and uphold a district court’s injunction on Texas’ H.B. 20, a new state law that prohibits large social media platforms that claim to be open to the public from blocking, removing, or “demonetizing” content based on the users’ political or social views. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh joined Breyer and Sotomayor in the majority, but did not publish a written explanation for the decision. Justice Alito dissented and was joined by Gorsuch and Thomas. Kagan would also have opted against the injunction, but did not join Alito’s written dissent.

Alito emphasized in his dissent that because these companies are relatively new and present a novel question of what defines a common carrier, the law should be allowed to remain in place by default as the merits of the case are adjudicated in the district court.