Rand Paul: FCC chair had "no business" intervening in ABC/Kimmel controversy

But they didn’t intervene. He made a statement indicating they’d look into it. Action from FCC would require the commissioners to vote. Not just a unilateral choice by the chair.

There is also some allowance for the FCC to regulate content under some circumstances, and it has been upheld as constitutional previously. Brendan Carr, the FCC chair, rejected doing anything about online content because it would be unconstitutional.

In spirit I don’t think government or large companies should be moderating or censoring speech. But Rand Paul should be focusing on the precedence of FCC being able to regulate things like “obscenity”.

The problem isn't limited to the FCC in this case. The FCC doesn't actually have to act - it could be someone in the SEC, it could be the DOJ, or (as we have learned) it can literally be about bags of cash.

The FCC chair's statement was a bit of an indirect threat ("Pity if someone looked into your affiliates licenses"). But the timing makes it clear they were at least aware of and complicit in the backroom dealings that led to the show being taken off the air.

There's a different between making a threat and posing a threat. The reason we're having this discussion at all is because we've vested too much power in bureaucracies that have too much discretion in how they use it.

No, the reason we're having this discussion is because the current Supreme Court doesn't seem to actually be interested in precedence or existing law, just saying yes to whatever whim Trump has this week.

Under any normally functioning government, the head of the FCC would never threaten a television station because it's both an obvious violation of the first amendment, and under literally any other administration would have resulted in immediate dismissal.

JFK and LBJ systematically leveraged the FCC's obligation to uphold the Fairness Doctrine to weaponize mass-produced complaints against right-leaning radio shows to legally harass them

In 1963 the FCC passed the Cullman Doctrine, which was an attempt to double-down on those efforts by bankrupting those who literally couldn't afford to cover equal time

Nixon used the FCC to threaten the Washington Post with licensure revocation in an attempt to get them to squash coverage of Watergate

Presidents on both sides of recent history have used the might of the government to demand abject censorship on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms.

The prior sitting president attempted to establish a ministry of truth, slated as a new entity intended to reside within the department of homeland security so as to supercharge those efforts, and appointed Nina "I believe I should be allowed to edit other people's tweets" Jankowicz to executive director

None of these are healthy, but the idea that Carr's actions are somehow the result of the modern Supreme Court's actions requires us to ignore all of American history before Trump's second election