Last Sunday on Meet the Press, Sen. Rand Paul (R‑Ky) addressed two areas where President Trump has stumbled in recent days, losing many conservatives and civil libertarians: censorship and lawfare.
“Senator,” Kristen Welker asked, “do you believe that President Trump is sending the message that he only supports free speech when it’s speech that he agrees with?”
“Well, I can’t control everything the president says. And I don’t think that having the FCC weigh in on licenses is right. I will fight that,” the junior senator from Kentucky declared. “But I can tell you that throughout government, the censorship apparatus that Biden had put in place is gone.”
Under President Biden, the senator explained, employees and ex-employees of both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security set up offices inside Twitter, while “Facebook was told to take down information concerning the origins of the Covid virus” under threat of “being broken up by antitrust. So we have had official censorship going on for many years now, and everybody on the left just looked the other way.
“They actually had an office, an office of censorship.”
Welker then inquired if he thought it was “appropriate for the president to direct the attorney general to go after his political opponents”?
“I think lawfare in all forms is bad,” Rand Paul replied. “What they did to Donald Trump was an abomination. But yes, it is not right for the Trump administration to do the same thing.
“We need to get politics out of the judicial system as much as we can. But we can’t do it without acknowledging that the king of lawfare was Biden.”
True enough, with the full title: Marionette Censor Joe, King of Lawfare, First of His Name If Not of His Kind.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Who Is the Lawfare King?”
Not right for Trump to do the same thing. “Same thing” is a vague term. Should mean that it’s not ok to twist the law and come up with unique interpretations that have never been so applied in the history of our country. “Same thing” doesn’t mean regular enforcement of existing laws. Doesn’t mean enforcement of criminal charges for those members of the prior administration that willingly participated in violating the constitutional rights of 10s of thousands of citizens. That’s not the same thing. That is a much older thing, reserved for tyranny.
So, how are those people who abused their power by going after Trump to be held accountable?
Senator Paul said he didn’t think it was right for the FCC to weigh in on licenses. All well and good. But the FCC can pressure stations in other ways, such as denying their right to acquire other stations. As a regular listener to a certain radio shock jock decades ago, the FCC claimed to receive frequent complaints about the show’s content. They used their influence by hindering the employers’ efforts to build a syndicated network. Then they had the manager of the station monitor the show and block out ‘undesirable’ content. The station would go dark for several seconds and then pick up again in mid-conversation. The performers weren’t aware of it unless a listener told them. The FCC can engage in censorship by proxy.