The Supreme Court declined Monday to hear an appeal from two Michigan middle school students barred from wearing “Let’s Go Brandon” sweatshirts, leaving a lower-court ruling in place that the slogan could be prohibited as vulgar speech.
The justices gave no reason for denying the appeal. The case involved students ordered to strip off anti-Joe Biden apparel at Tri County Middle School in Howard City, roughly 35 miles north of Grand Rapids. The denial leaves a lower-court ruling intact. In October 2025, the Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had held, 2-1, that the school could treat the phrase as vulgar even though its message was political.
“In the schoolhouse, vulgarity trumps politics,” wrote Judge John Nalbandian, a Trump appointee, in a majority opinion joined by Judge Karen Nelson Moore, an appointee of President Bill Clinton.
The slogan spread in the fall of 2021 after NBC reporter Kelli Stavast, interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown following the Xfinity Series’ Sparks 300, characterized a crowd chanting “F— Joe Biden” as cheering “Let’s Go Brandon.”
The mother sued in 2023, saying the district violated her sons’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. A teacher and an assistant principal had told the brothers to take the shirts off. Their reasoning, per the lawsuit: the slogan was “equivalent to the f-word.” Court papers name the boys only by their initials. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free-speech advocacy group, filed the suit on their behalf.
“Criticism of the president is core political speech protected by the First Amendment,” FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick said in a statement. “Whether it’s a Biden sticker, ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ sweatshirt or gay pride T-shirt, schools can’t pick and choose which political beliefs students can express.”
An attorney for the district countered that the shirts were barred under the dress code, not for their politics, and the district’s brief urged the justices to accept that lewd messages do not belong in class even when they touch on political topics. In dissent, Judge John Bush, another Trump appointee, argued the majority had handed schools a dangerous tool.
“If we allow schools the power to censor political speech by recharacterizing it as vulgarity, we risk turning disagreement with political speech into justification for its censorship,” Bush wrote.
The denial follows the justices’ refusal in May 2025 to hear a Massachusetts student’s challenge after his school barred a shirt reading “There are only two genders,” a case in which Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas publicly dissented.
The denial drew a run of reactions, where X users split over whether students shed their free-speech rights at the schoolhouse door.