Republicans on the Senate Commerce Committee called out Democrats for supposedly rediscovering a love of free speech after letting the Biden administration run roughshod over it for four years.
The Republican rebuke occurred during an FCC oversight hearing Wednesday, as several Democrats attempted to attack FCC Chairman Brendan Carr for exercising the FCC's authority to regulate broadcast networks. Committee Chairman Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), however, were having none of it.
Cruz predicted that Democrats' would “hammer” Carr over their “newfound religion on the First Amendment and free speech,” and pointed out that those concerns were “miraculously absent when the Biden administration was pressuring Big Tech to silence Americans for wrongthink on COVID and election security.”
Like clockwork, Democrats went after Carr for comments he made after Jimmy Kimmel misrepresented the political ideology of Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer, as a Trump supporter, claiming that “the MAGA gang [was] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” The truth of Kimmel’s comments was doubtful at the time, and evidence has since emerged suggesting that Robinson likely has radical left-wing views.
The FCC is responsible for enforcing laws that require public broadcast stations to adhere to a public interest standard that prohibits hoaxes and “news distortion.” Thus, Carr responded to Kimmel’s misrepresentations on the Benny Johnson Show, saying, “Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, Kimmel, or you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider noted in an op-ed for The Hill that the “Carr’s critics paint him as censor-in-chief — ignoring Joe Biden’s massive censorship initiatives. But the facts tell a different story. Carr is simply upholding longstanding federal obligations to ensure that our public airwaves serve all Americans, not just a partisan sliver.”
He added, “Local affiliates of ABC, NBC and CBS operate on publicly owned frequencies, granted free of charge by the FCC. This is no small privilege — it is a massive public subsidy, akin to the taxpayer funding that supported NPR and PBS.”
Nonetheless, Carr’s comments received sharp criticism from Senate Democrats during the hearing. Sen. Markey (D-MA), for example, said Carr was “turning the Federal Communications Commission into the Federal Censorship Commission. It’s a betrayal of the FCC’s mission.” He called on Carr to resign for having a “chilling effect on broadcast journalism.”
This was despite Markey having signed a letter in 2018 requesting that the FCC investigate Sinclair Broadcast Group’s news content and potentially revoke its licensing renewal. The content he and other Democrats found objectionable was a critique of blatant bias in the news industry.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), during her line of questioning, accused Carr of censoring Kimmel while also criticizing him for not supporting social media censorship. She claimed he was “threatening companies” with his comments about enforcing existing U.S. law.
Klobuchar then proceeded to ask whether it was appropriate for President Donald Trump to criticize Hollywood filmmaker Rob Reiner’s politics on Truth Social shortly after her was murdered. “Do you think that's appropriate for the President of the United States to do that? And if Jimmy Kimmel would have said that, would have you have threatened to take him off the air?” she asked
Carr caught on to the senator’s baiting question right away and called her on it. “Democrats on this dias are accusing me of engaging in censorship, and now you're trying to encourage me to police speech on the internet. I'm simply not gonna do it.”
Cruz and Schmitt also called out their Democrat colleagues for their stunning claims of returning to free speech principles.
Cruz highlighted the 2018 letter signed by Markey and 11 others, as well as a 2023 petition seeking to revoke FOX29 WTXF-TV’s license over election security claims aired on Fox News Channel. The Texas Republican said:
“Not a single Democrat on this committee had a word to say about it. …You know what? I don't like what MSNBC says, but I'm not urging the commission to take away MSNBC's license, and so suddenly, when the current administration and FCC makes comments about Jimmy Kimmel, comments that, as you know, I disagreed with and spoke out against—suddenly Democrats have discovered the First Amendment.” [Emphasis added.]
Sen. Schmitt agreed:
“The idea that my Democrat colleagues are so offended that the First Amendment may be or may not be violated by some comment you made, I think is just extraordinary given the last 4 years that we lived through. … I filed the Missouri versus Biden lawsuit that a federal judge, a federal judge ruled was the most massive attack against free speech in US history, where entire agencies … were weaponized against the American people on the instruction of the federal government and not just one agency, but a leviathan of agencies that had words and phrases that you shall not utter in the United States of America or you are censored.”
Indeed, MRC Free Speech America uncovered 57 Biden Administration censorship initiatives that spanned across 93 agencies.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the CensorTrack contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
