The latest lawsuit of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, disputing his designation of the group as a terror organization, is being marketed as another major legal confrontation.
In reality, it appears to suffer from the same fatal flaw that has undermined CAIR’s recent litigation elsewhere: a lack of standing.
In its complaint, CAIR struggles to identify any concrete injury traceable to DeSantis’s executive action. Instead, its primary claim of harm appears to be that a “production company” has stopped hosting CAIR’s podcasts. CAIR does not identify the company, does not explain the reason given for ending the relationship, and does not establish that the decision had anything to do with DeSantis’s order rather than ordinary business, reputational, or content-related concerns.
Courts have consistently held that speculative, third-party decisions — especially unexplained ones — do not establish standing. A private company’s choice not to distribute content is not government action, and CAIR offers no evidence that the state compelled or influenced that decision.