On October 5, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case asking whether a public school may ban a political slogan because administrators consider it a disguised obscenity. The denial settles nothing nationally. It leaves in place a divided Sixth Circuit ruling in which two Trump-appointed judges reached opposite conclusions about the same sweatshirt.
The Court’s order in No. 25-1143, D.A. v. Tri County Area Schools carries no stated reasoning. SCOTUSblog’s order-list coverage reports no noted dissent in the case, and the docket page lists none. But the lower-court record behind that line is detailed, and it exposes a doctrinal fault that conservatives, who have spent a decade defending student and campus speech, have an interest in understanding: how much deference a school’s label of “vulgar” should receive when the speech in question is political.
The narrow question was a dress-code dispute in a Michigan middle school. The broader one is who decides where political expression ends and vulgarity begins, and what a court must ask before accepting the school’s answer.
What the Record Shows
According to Education Week’s account of the Sixth Circuit decision, two brothers at Tri County Middle School in Howard City, Michigan, an eighth grader and a sixth grader identified in the litigation by initials, wore “Let’s Go Brandon” apparel in early 2022. An assistant principal told the older boy to remove a hoodie, reportedly likening the slogan to an expletive. He complied, wore it again weeks later, and complied again. In May 2022 the younger brother was told to remove a sweatshirt. Administrators cited a dress code barring attire with messages that are “lewd, indecent, vulgar, or profane.” The boys’ mother sued the district and two administrators under the First Amendment. The district court granted summary judgment to the school.
The Sixth Circuit affirmed on October 14, 2025, in B.A. v. Tri County Area Schools, No. 24-1769, by a 2-1 vote. Judge Nalbandian wrote the majority opinion, Judge Moore concurred, and Judge Bush dissented. The procedural history after that is documented on the Supreme Court’s docket: rehearing was denied on December 26, 2025; the petition was filed on March 26, 2026; four groups filed amicus briefs (First Amendment scholars, the Buckeye Institute, Defending Education and the National Coalition Against Censorship); the district initially waived a response, then filed an opposition brief on June 17 after the Court requested one; and the petition was denied on October 5, 2026.
The sweatshirts contained no profane word; the majority nonetheless treated the slogan as a euphemism for one. The dispute is what the slogan means and who gets to say.
The Majority: Vulgarity Outranks Politics
Judge Nalbandian’s opinion begins from Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), under which a school generally may not punish student speech without a reasonable forecast of substantial disruption. It then invokes an exception: Bethel School District v. Fraser (1986), which allows schools to discipline lewd or vulgar student speech without any showing of disruption. The Court’s later decision in Mahanoy lists vulgar speech among the recognized categories where a school’s authority is greater.
The panel majority reasoned that the slogan is widely understood as a euphemism for a vulgar expletive directed at then-President Joe Biden, and that a euphemism can carry a vulgar message as effectively as the word it replaces. It held that courts should defer to a school’s reasonable, good-faith judgment about what is vulgar. In the opinion’s words, Fraser “puts a thumb on the scale in favor of the school administrators,” and, in its most quoted line, “[i]n the schoolhouse, vulgarity trumps politics.”
The majority also confronted the argument that the shirts were political. It answered that the speech at issue in Fraser was itself political as well as vulgar, and noted that a political message does not exempt vulgar expression. It pointed to earlier Sixth Circuit authority upholding a ban on a rock band’s T-shirts as vulgar and offensive. It relied on the doctrine of in loco parentis and nineteenth-century precedent for deference to school authorities. And it declined to follow the Third Circuit’s en banc decision in B.H. v. Easton, which the dissent endorsed as a narrower reading of Fraser.
The Dissent: A Political Message Does Not Become Obscene by Translation
Judge Bush, also a Trump appointee, wrote that “Tinker, not Fraser, should apply.” He called the slogan “purely political speech,” observed that it contains neither a profane word nor sexual content, and argued that the school never claimed the shirts would cause substantial disruption. In his view, the majority’s rule lets a school suppress political criticism by recharacterizing it as vulgarity. He also argued that any vulgarity the school perceived derives from the political message rather than from the words themselves. He would have vacated and remanded, leaving only qualified immunity on damages to be addressed below.
The dissent added two points worth noting. First, it argued that the school’s deference rationale is weaker where parents approved of the speech, as the boys’ mother did by giving them the sweatshirts. Second, it placed the slogan in a long tradition of mocking the nation’s presidents, citing examples from Washington through Lincoln. This analysis is drawn from the portion of the dissent available to RSN; the text was truncated before its conclusion.
Where the Circuits Divide
The disagreement is not merely between two judges. The majority’s own footnote acknowledges that courts divide over how to read Justice Alito’s concurrence in Morse v. Frederick, which stressed limits on school authority over political and social commentary. According to the opinion, most circuits treat Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion in Morse as controlling, and the Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, treats Justice Alito’s concurrence as controlling. The dissent, for its part, lists circuits it says apply Tinker to political student apparel and describes the majority as creating a split.
RSN has not independently read each of those out-of-circuit decisions, and the characterizations above are the two judges’ own. What is verifiable is that a federal appellate panel divided on this question, that the third judge on the panel wrote a lengthy dissent grounded in circuit authority, and that the Supreme Court, after requesting a response and rescheduling the petition for conference, chose not to take it up.
Why This Matters to Conservatives
The family was represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, whose public description of the petition framed the issue as whether schools may ban “sanitized political expression just because someone considers it profane.” FIRE argued that letting each administrator apply a personal vulgarity test invites viewpoint discrimination, noting that a shirt could be protected in one classroom and not another.
That argument connects to a principle RSN has examined before, in our analysis of the dual standard in speech controversies: protections that apply only to favored speakers are not principles. A rule that lets a school bar a slogan critical of a Democratic president would, on its own logic, let a school bar one critical of a Republican president. The proposition holds in either political direction, and anyone who wants Tinker to protect religious, pro-life or patriotic expression in schools has a stake in how narrowly Fraser is read. The Court did use its October 1 conference to take up a different dispute, over executive rewriting of settled law, in the mandatory immigration detention case RSN covered earlier this month; it chooses which splits to resolve.
There is a serious counterargument, and it deserves its due. Schools are not public squares. Administrators answer to parents for the environment in which twelve-year-olds learn, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly said that student speech rights are not coextensive with adult rights. A school that bars a slogan most adults understand as a profanity is not obviously acting from partisan motive, and the majority’s concern that vulgarity standards shift over time is not frivolous. Conservatives who favor local control of schools and parental authority have reasons to be wary of federal courts second-guessing dress codes. The majority’s deference is, in that sense, a conservative position of its own. That the two judges on opposite sides of this case share an appointing president illustrates that the question does not map neatly onto party.
What Is Proven, What Is Not
Documented in the record: the date and vote of the Sixth Circuit ruling; the dress-code language; that the boys complied with the instructions; that the Supreme Court denied review on October 5, 2026, after the district opposed; and the competing legal rules the majority and dissent adopted.
Not established: why the Court denied review. A denial of certiorari is not a ruling on the merits and carries no precedential weight, and the Court gave no explanation. It would be a mistake to read the denial as endorsing the Sixth Circuit’s approach, or as rejecting it. RSN also did not review the district’s brief in opposition, so its arguments for denial, including any claim that the case is a poor vehicle, are not addressed here.
Source limitations: the opinion, docket and Education Week and SCOTUSblog accounts were read through a summarizing tool rather than as complete texts, and the opinion text was truncated partway through the dissent. Quotations should be checked against the linked opinion before being reused.
The Open Question
A student in the Sixth Circuit now knows that a political slogan with no profane word can be removed from school if administrators reasonably read it as vulgar. A student in a circuit following the narrower view may not. That is the kind of inconsistency the Supreme Court exists to resolve, and for now it has declined to do so. The next student whose shirt, hat or poster draws an administrator’s objection will meet whichever rule the local circuit applies.
The principle at stake does not depend on the slogan. If political speech may be reclassified as vulgarity by the person with authority to punish it, the protection of Tinker becomes a matter of administrative taste. The justices may take up the question in a later case. Until then, the line between political expression and punishable vulgarity in American public schools depends on geography.