One of the big policy ideas House Republicans are pursuing now that they have a majority is their so-called “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”
It’s meant to sound active, engaged and full of righteous constitutional fury. At best, it’s going to generate a few viral memes – in other words, theater meant to entertain/inflame the base but accomplish nothing of importance.
Maybe that’s a good thing. The group will keep several members busy, preventing them from doing any real harm to life or liberty elsewhere. That is the optimistic case. The less optimistic, and far less charitable, case will be a committee that takes a holistic view of government’s repeated, insistent and bipartisan intrusions and meddling – if not casual thuggery – into the private sector.
As the R Street Institute’s Adam Thierer writes, there’s plenty of material to work with. Not just the president’s various threats against private industry or the comically high-handed approach to the private sector we’ve come to expect from the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the House Democratic “Squad.”
There’s plenty for Republicans to own up to, as well:
Just this week, for example, several Senate Republicans fired off a letter to DirecTV accusing the satellite company of censoring conservative television network Newsmax by not renewing it on their channel lineup. There is no “censorship” here, however. DirecTV and Newsmax are involved in a garden-variety carriage dispute over money. This happens regularly between cable systems and content providers. Government should not be strong-arming parties by putting a thumb on one side of the negotiating scale because they favor a particular channel’s content. Again, that betrays the First Amendment and “weaponizes” federal power for political ends.
Republicans have engaged in other jawboning behavior in recent years. At a 2020 hearing, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R‑Tenn.) asked Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai if the company had yet fired an employee who had been critical of her. Sen. Josh Hawley, (R-Mo.) has repeatedly come after Twitter and other social media companies for their content moderation choices. Hawley even suggested that “we’d be better off if Facebook disappeared” and floated anti-social media legislation that former President Donald Trump also supported. Hawley also joined Trump at a White House “Social Media Summit” in 2019 to browbeat private companies and threaten them with regulation, shortly after Trump declared the news media “the enemy of the American people.”
Weaponized government, then, is very much in the eye of the beholder. The sad thing is, few, if any, members of the major political parties are interested in garden-variety congressional oversight. And none whatsoever are interested in advocating for a limited government that doesn’t threaten, bully or coerce its citizens.
Once again. The great H. L. Mencken was right when he said, “All government, of course, is against liberty.”
It’s a feature, not a bug, of our political culture.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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Sorry, Norm, you are off base! Even if all we can do is EXPOSE all the evil done by the SWAMP, that’s better than just sitting back and doing nothing!!
All I care about is that the social media outlets be under the same rules as institutions that make editorial decisions, since they do the same.
Couldn’t disagree with you more…
Some people think that a site named American Liberty would be about American Liberty but in the case of Norman here, they would be wrong. There is no way you can cherry pick a few anecdotal pronouncements from representatives, representatives who have just endured several years of the “revolution” from democrats, and in any way, balance the difference between the Republican party and the jack as…, excuse me, donkeys, of the democrat party. Norman is trying to say, as usual, that Republicans are just as bad when in reality, Republicans may be many things but as far as I can tell, Republicans are not advocating for a country based on Marxist theories such as the democrat platform. I think Norman is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and does not represent a conservative viewpoint. Consider carefully what he tries to persuade you to believe while the democrats are pulling down Lady Liberty every day. A major diversion I believe.
????? wrong.
Cynical Weltschmerz rides again.
Its not even wrong, it doesn’t make sense.