The Supreme Court also heard an important First Amendment case today in Moody v. Netchoice

If you were following each of the Supreme Court’s cases on Monday morning, you probably felt a little anxious.

The biggest news from the Court on Monday is, of course, the sweeping decision that found that former President Donald Trump had a practical right to commit crimes while in office. Indeed, according to a decision by six Republican justices in Trump vs. United StatesIt is very likely that a sitting president can order the military to kill his political rivals without facing any criminal consequences for his actions.

Just minutes before the Supreme Court issued its ruling trump card decision, however, also produced another case confirming that the First Amendment does not allow Republican-led lawmakers to take control of what content is published by media companies. This decision, in Moody vs NetchoiceThe verdict was 6-3, with three Republican justices who also found that the GOP leader had the authority to commit multiple crimes while in office joining Justice Elena Kagan in the majority opinion.

So on the same day that the Supreme Court apparently ruled that a sitting president can commit the most horrific crimes against someone who dares to speak out against him, that same Court — with three justices joining both rulings — ruled that the First Amendment still places some limits on the government’s ability to control what appears on the internet.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined both decisions in their entirety. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined Network selection the opinion in its entirety, and almost all of it trump card decision.

It is impossible to fathom the value system that would lead a judge to combine the two decisions, but here we are anyway. That said, the Court’s decision in Network selection is a victory for free speech, even if it coincided with one of the most chilling decisions in Supreme Court history.

Network selection concerns two state laws, one in Florida and one in Texas, that aim to control what content major social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube must post. Both laws were passed by Republican legislatures and signed by Republican governors in an effort to force those platforms to post right-wing content they would rather not post.

As Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said before signing the state law, it was passed to stop what he said was a “dangerous movement by social media companies to silence conservative views and ideas.”

These two laws, especially Texas law, are incredibly broad. For example, Texas law prohibits major social media companies from moderating content based on “the viewpoint of a user or another person” or “the viewpoint represented in a user’s statement or another person’s statement.”

It’s such a sweeping restriction on content moderation that it would prohibit companies like YouTube and Twitter from removing content that is offensive, promotes violence, or seeks to overthrow the U.S. government. In fact, Kagan’s opinion includes a bullet-point list of eight topics that Texas law doesn’t allow platforms to moderate, including posts that “support Nazi ideology” or that “encourage teenagers to commit suicide or self-harm.”

In any case, Kagan makes clear that this kind of government takeover of social media moderation is impermissible, and he repeatedly rebukes the far-right U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which upheld the Texas law.

As Kagan writes, the First Amendment prohibits the government from forcing platforms to “convey or promote speech that users would rather reject or downplay.” He also cites several previous Supreme Court rulings that support this argument, including his “landmark” decision in Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo (1974), which stated that a newspaper has the right to have final control over the “selection of materials for publication.”

Nothing in Kagan’s opinion breaks new ground—it is common knowledge that the government cannot seize editorial control over the media, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who cares even a little about free speech and the press. But the Court’s reassertion of this simple and once-unarguable legal principle is still jarring on the same day that the Court issued a blueprint for Trump’s dictatorship in its presidential immunity case.

It’s also worth noting that Kagan’s decision is technically a victory for Texas and Florida, though for such narrow reasons that the victory is unlikely to matter.

Specific possession Network selection The opinion rests on a distinction between a “facial” challenge to state law and a more limited “applied” challenge.

The face challenge that social media platforms have filed against the unconstitutional laws of Texas and Florida argues that the law is unconstitutional in all of its applications and must be effectively struck from the books in its entirety. This contrasts with the “as applied” challenge, which simply argues that the law is unconstitutional when enforced against a specific plaintiff in a specific context.

But face challenges are notoriously difficult to win. Typically, Kagan writes, a plaintiff must show that “there is no set of circumstances in which (the law) would be valid,” although it is somewhat easier to win such a case in a First Amendment context.

While Kagan Network selection The opinion outlines why Texas and Florida laws are unconstitutional when applied to social media companies’ core product — a carefully curated list of content generated by social media users — and both laws are so broadly worded that they could also apply to less basic features of websites like Facebook and Twitter, such as “direct messaging or event management.”

Kagan criticizes the lower courts for failing to make a separate assessment of whether the rules can be constitutionally applied to these non-essential functions, and sends the case back to those lower courts to do that work. That said, the bulk of her opinion is pretty clear that the rules can’t be constitutionally applied to essential functions like Facebook’s newsfeed or YouTube’s home page.

So on the same day that the Supreme Court declared presidents above the law, it apparently also ruled that lower government officials must still respect the First Amendment.