George Will telling it like it is.
In an 1892 case concerning a police officer’s First Amendment challenge to a law proscribing political activity by officers, a justice on Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court wrote: The officer “may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.” First Amendment protections of government employees and everyone else have expanded since Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that pithy formulation 10 years before beginning 29 years on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Progressives today are mourning the fleeting (six-day) martyrdom of Jimmy Kimmel, archetype of today’s late-night sometime-comedians, all-the-time-propagandists. And some progressives, noticing how big government can throw its weight around by working levers of coercion, are perhaps having an epiphany: Actual conservatives sensibly warn that government has too much weight and too many levers.
Perhaps progressives should have been more troubled when the Biden administration was throwing its weight around, using regulatory threats from the White House and federal agencies to pressure social media companies to censor what that administration called “covid misinformation.” Some of what Joe Biden’s people wanted suppressed was true, or arguably so.
Although that administration’s coercion became public, it was intended to be done privately. Perhaps that administration, to its limited credit, had an uneasy conscience. And, in extenuation, that administration was improvising during a public health emergency about an imperfectly understood virus.
The Trump administration is exuberantly public about its censorship aspirations. They are connected only to its ambitious agenda to curate American culture to the liking of the president and his epigones.
Fortunately, Brendan Carr, President Donald Trump’s choice to chair the Federal Communications Commission, is a person of helpful coarseness. The law empowering the FCC to require that broadcasters operate in “the public interest” assumes two things that Carr demonstrates cannot be assumed:
That vague terms such as “the public interest,” allowing vast discretion to those construing them, will not be twisted for partisan purposes. And that the Senate will not confirm presidential toadies to positions where they can infuse unintended meanings into statutory language. If someday some defibrillator restores Congress’s heartbeat, the legislators might legislate about this.
The Trump administration frequently explores new frontiers of crudeness in pushing against the idea of unwritten restraints. There is, however, nothing new about attempts to expand political control over communications technologies.
We might soon see an attempt to resurrect a discredited doctrine. To complete its comprehensive repudiation of actual conservatism, the Trump administration might try to undo one of Ronald Reagan’s finest achievements: abolition of the misleadingly named and abusively implemented Fairness Doctrine.
In 1927, the federal government, using limited radio spectrum space as a pretext, began regulating the content of broadcasts. In 1928, the government decided that, although a New York City station owned by the Socialist Party was not in the public interest, its license was renewed after the government sternly warned it to show “due regard for the opinions of others.” What was “due”? Who knew?
The Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to devote a reasonable amount of time to each side of a controversial issue. How much was reasonable? Who (and by what metric) would measure the threshold at which an issue became sufficiently controversial? Who would decide how many sides there were to an issue?
The first Republican president said: This country “belongs to the people who inhabit it.” But it depends on the people who inhibit its government, sometimes by ignoring it.
In July, the current Republican president (Henry Adams said the succession of presidents, from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant, upset the theory of evolution) demanded that the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians “immediately” change their names back to the Redskins and Indians, respectively. This is what then happened: nothing. Sometimes presidential noise is only that, until it is treated as more than that.
George Will - Washington Post
In an 1892 case concerning a police officer’s First Amendment challenge to a law proscribing political activity by officers, a justice on Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court wrote: The officer “may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.” First Amendment protections of government employees and everyone else have expanded since Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that pithy formulation 10 years before beginning 29 years on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Progressives today are mourning the fleeting (six-day) martyrdom of Jimmy Kimmel, archetype of today’s late-night sometime-comedians, all-the-time-propagandists. And some progressives, noticing how big government can throw its weight around by working levers of coercion, are perhaps having an epiphany: Actual conservatives sensibly warn that government has too much weight and too many levers.
Perhaps progressives should have been more troubled when the Biden administration was throwing its weight around, using regulatory threats from the White House and federal agencies to pressure social media companies to censor what that administration called “covid misinformation.” Some of what Joe Biden’s people wanted suppressed was true, or arguably so.
Although that administration’s coercion became public, it was intended to be done privately. Perhaps that administration, to its limited credit, had an uneasy conscience. And, in extenuation, that administration was improvising during a public health emergency about an imperfectly understood virus.
The Trump administration is exuberantly public about its censorship aspirations. They are connected only to its ambitious agenda to curate American culture to the liking of the president and his epigones.
Fortunately, Brendan Carr, President Donald Trump’s choice to chair the Federal Communications Commission, is a person of helpful coarseness. The law empowering the FCC to require that broadcasters operate in “the public interest” assumes two things that Carr demonstrates cannot be assumed:
That vague terms such as “the public interest,” allowing vast discretion to those construing them, will not be twisted for partisan purposes. And that the Senate will not confirm presidential toadies to positions where they can infuse unintended meanings into statutory language. If someday some defibrillator restores Congress’s heartbeat, the legislators might legislate about this.
The Trump administration frequently explores new frontiers of crudeness in pushing against the idea of unwritten restraints. There is, however, nothing new about attempts to expand political control over communications technologies.
We might soon see an attempt to resurrect a discredited doctrine. To complete its comprehensive repudiation of actual conservatism, the Trump administration might try to undo one of Ronald Reagan’s finest achievements: abolition of the misleadingly named and abusively implemented Fairness Doctrine.
In 1927, the federal government, using limited radio spectrum space as a pretext, began regulating the content of broadcasts. In 1928, the government decided that, although a New York City station owned by the Socialist Party was not in the public interest, its license was renewed after the government sternly warned it to show “due regard for the opinions of others.” What was “due”? Who knew?
The Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to devote a reasonable amount of time to each side of a controversial issue. How much was reasonable? Who (and by what metric) would measure the threshold at which an issue became sufficiently controversial? Who would decide how many sides there were to an issue?
The first Republican president said: This country “belongs to the people who inhabit it.” But it depends on the people who inhibit its government, sometimes by ignoring it.
In July, the current Republican president (Henry Adams said the succession of presidents, from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant, upset the theory of evolution) demanded that the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians “immediately” change their names back to the Redskins and Indians, respectively. This is what then happened: nothing. Sometimes presidential noise is only that, until it is treated as more than that.
George Will - Washington Post
