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US President Donald Trump needs to settle the legal debate around the constitutionality of blocking critics on Twitter for good. The White House officially petitioned the Supreme Court earlier this morning, to overturn a decision handed down by an appeals court earlier this year. It founds that the president’s Twitter-blocking tendencies were in violation of the First Amendment. The petition said, “The decision of the court of appeals warrants this Court’s review. By ignoring the critical distinction between the President’s sometimes official statements on Twitter and his always personal decision to block respondents from his own account, the opinion blurs the line between state action and private conduct”.

The petition is claiming among other things that the president used a Twitter feature available equally to everyone, so his actions were not fairly attributable to the State. Point to be noted that the case was first filed by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute in July 2017. It has since kicked off both a protracted legal battle and a wider conversation about the nature of the president’s Twitter account. A Judge Naomi Buchwald of New York’s Southern District ruled after one year that President Trump’s ceaseless stream of tweets and the conversations around it constitute a public forum. As a result, users blocked by the president as a result of participating in those conversations legally amounted to curtailing their right to free speech.

There are a number of court decisions ruling against President Trump in this case that would seem to make the legality of this situation pretty straightforward. Some are already calling on the highest court in the land to uphold those earlier decisions. The executive director of the Knight Institute issued a statement and said, “This case stands for a principle that is fundamental to our democracy and basically synonymous with the First Amendment: government officials can’t exclude people from public forums simply because they disagree with their political views. The Supreme Court should reject the White House’s petition and leave the appeals court’s careful and well-reasoned decision in place”.