By Clay Calvert
Nonresident Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Studies
American Enterprise Institute
In a sure sign of our topsy-turvy political times, Democrats in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are sponsoring legislation that seeks both to rein in the reach of federal regulatory authority and to promote the fundamental First Amendment value that expression of all viewpoints should be allowed rather than squelched and punished by government decree.
Unsurprisingly, it took the words and actions—real and potential—of President Donald Trump and his designee to chair the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, to provoke this through-the-looking-glass landscape. There’s sufficient irony here to move Alanis Morissette, especially given the Biden administration’s jawboning efforts to silence conservative and dissenting viewpoints on social media platforms that were at issue in 2024 before the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri.
