The Supreme Court on Monday refused to take up a contentious issue affecting students and school officials nationwide, declining to hear an appeal over Michigan middle schoolers being barred from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts.

The high court rejected the petition from a mother and her sons to whom she gifted the shirts bearing the coded anti-Joe Biden phrase. The family had asked the high court to decide whether schools can censor nondisruptive political speech that isn’t plainly profane or lewd.

The denial leaves unresolved what the family’s lawyers called a crucial constitutional question.

In line with the court’s typical practice, the justices did not explain the denial. The court has broad discretion over its docket, and it takes four justices on the nine-member bench to agree to review a case. The denial appeared on a regularly scheduled order list announcing the latest action on pending petitions, published as the justices return to the bench for the first hearings of the new term.

‘Vulgarity trumps politics’

The phrase at the center of the case arose during a 2021 post-race interview with winning driver Brandon Brown at the Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama. The crowd began chanting “F— Joe Biden,” and the reporter said, “You can hear the chants from the crowd, ‘Let’s Go Brandon.’” It became an anti-Biden meme.

The mother gave her sons the shirts for Christmas that year. They wore them to Tri County Middle School in Howard City, Michigan. Officials said to remove them, reasoning that the phrase “means the F-word” and has a “profane double meaning.” The school dress code prohibited clothing with “messages or illustrations that are lewd, indecent, vulgar, or profane.”

A federal district judge rejected the family’s lawsuit. So did the federal appeals court covering Michigan, in a divided ruling that split the two Trump appointees on the three-judge panel.

“In the schoolhouse, vulgarity trumps politics,” Trump-appointed Judge John Nalbandian wrote for the majority. He said political speech protections don’t give students “carte blanche to use vulgarity at school — even when that vulgarity is cloaked in innuendo or euphemism.” Clinton-appointed Judge Karen Nelson Moore joined the opinion.

In dissent, Trump-appointed Judge John Bush said the majority wrongly applied Supreme Court precedent and gave the students’ rights short shrift in the process. He said the brothers “participated in the broader civic discourse, a notion that the Supreme Court has never rendered inappropriate for the school environment.”

‘Stark threat’

Represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the family leaned on Bush’s dissent in its petition to the justices. “The decision below poses a stark threat to the First Amendment rights of millions of public school students,” the petition said, adding that the appellate ruling “licenses individual teachers and administrators to banish nondisruptive political speech containing sanitized expressions if it clashes with their personal notion of ‘vulgarity.’”

The petition said Supreme Court review was needed to clarify what is allowed in the nation’s schools. Under the court’s landmark 1969 ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines, students can wear political apparel unless it causes substantial disruption. But under 1986’s Bethel School District v. Fraser, schools can block profane and sexually lewd speech. Against that backdrop, the family asked the justices to decide whether schools can censor nondisruptive political speech that isn’t plainly profane or lewd.

Successfully opposing review, the Michigan school said that the Fraser precedent lets officials restrict political speech that’s vulgar, profane or lewd even when it’s “expressed in euphemisms.” The school said that a contrary rule would let vulgarity, lewdness and profanity “flood classrooms” through codewords and would stop schools “from teaching students how to engage in political discussions with civility.”

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