Supreme Court Rules In Case of School Ban on ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ Shirts

The Supreme Court declined Monday to hear a Michigan family’s challenge to a public school’s ban on “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts, leaving in place a ruling that allowed administrators to treat the political slogan as a profane message.

The decision ends the family’s effort to secure Supreme Court review of a dispute over whether schools may prohibit criticism of a president because the phrase indirectly references offensive language.

The justices offered no explanation for rejecting the appeal. Their action leaves the lower-court judgment standing but does not endorse its reasoning or establish a new Supreme Court rule governing the slogan.

The case began after Amanda Diei purchased sweatshirts bearing the phrase for her two sons as Christmas gifts in 2022.

Officials at Tri County Area Schools in western Michigan subsequently told the boys to remove the clothing, citing district rules against vulgar or profane messages.

Diei sued, arguing that the district had infringed her sons’ First Amendment rights by restricting political expression.

Her argument focused on a distinction central to the case: the words printed on the sweatshirts contain no profanity, even though the slogan’s origins connect it to an obscenity directed at former President Joe Biden.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, represented the family and criticized the outcome.

“The First Amendment doesn’t have a profanity exception, much less an exception for political speech that some people understand to reference profanity,” FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick said after the Court declined review.

The phrase originated during an October 2021 NASCAR event at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. As driver Brandon Brown participated in a television interview, spectators could be heard chanting an obscenity about Biden.

The interviewer suggested that the crowd was cheering “Let’s Go Brandon.” The phrase quickly became a recognizable expression of opposition to Biden, appearing on clothing, signs and other merchandise and at Republican political gatherings.

Its dual meaning drove the disagreement in Michigan.

The family maintained that administrators had engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination by suppressing a political message. FIRE warned that allowing schools to ban references to offensive language could give officials considerable latitude to censor political speech that contains no explicit profanity.

The district defended its actions as enforcement of a content-neutral policy against vulgar messages.

School officials said they had also prohibited clothing displaying profanity or phrases understood to represent profanity without regard to the political position involved. In their view, the message conveyed by the slogan placed it within the existing rule.

A federal district judge ruled largely for the school system. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Cincinnati, subsequently upheld that decision.

The appeals court concluded that administrators could reasonably interpret the phrase as communicating a profane message. It relied on Supreme Court precedents recognizing that public schools possess greater authority to regulate student expression than government officials generally have outside the school setting.

The competing arguments drew on two major student-speech decisions.

In Tinker v. Des Moines, decided in 1969, the Supreme Court held that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

That case protected students wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War. School officials needed grounds to demonstrate substantial disruption before suppressing that expression.

A later decision recognized limits on student speech in school.

In Bethel School District v. Fraser in 1986, the Court upheld discipline imposed on a student for a speech containing sexual innuendo, allowing schools to restrict lewd and vulgar expression.

The Michigan lawsuit tested the boundary between those principles. The sweatshirts carried a political slogan whose literal wording was unobjectionable, but whose understood reference school officials considered vulgar.

Diei’s attorneys argued that the 6th Circuit had given administrators excessive discretion to label political messages offensive and restrict them. They asked the Supreme Court to clarify the protections that apply when students express a political viewpoint through an indirect reference.

The district urged the justices to leave the judgment undisturbed.

Monday’s denial does just that. It does not amount to a Supreme Court determination that the slogan is unprotected in every public school, nor does it resolve the broader constitutional question on the merits.

The Court accepts only a small share of the thousands of petitions it receives each term and ordinarily gives no reason for declining a case.

For the Michigan family, however, the practical result is clear: the ruling permitting the district’s restriction remains in place. The dispute leaves a consequential free-speech question unresolved at the nation’s highest court—how far school administrators may go in prohibiting political criticism based on what its words imply.