It has long been clear that the GOP, as it is today, has a death wish for our Constitutional order, but that’s a subject for another post. What’s more relevant is that, at this point, one could easily construe that Democrats would like our Constitution to die too. In part because of how enfeebled they have so far been in resisting the lawlessness exhibited by the Article II branch of our government—although that, too, is a subject for another post. (Standing against the Vought OMB nomination, and slowing his appointment process, is good. But it’s not enough, and even though it’s a good start, it doesn’t forgive all the missed opportunities to slow the damage everyone could see coming from a mile away and provide the leadership needed to assure the public that they had their back so that the public could then, in turn, back them.)
What is a subject for this post is how, in bizarrely continuing with any sort of normal order in the face of an actual coup taking place under their noses—literally right down the street—the thing that they are trying to do with normal order is censor the Internet.
It is suicidal idiocy to do either of these things, let alone both. There is no political math that could justify Democrats not only not doing everything in their power to defend Congress’s Article I powers, but then using those powers in ways the First Amendment expressly tells them they can’t.
And yet that is what at least some Senate Democrats have gone and done by moving forward KOSMA. The bill, which is a “bi-partisan” bill initially pushed by Democratic Senator Brian Schatz (in partnership with fellow Dem Chris Murphy, along with Republicans Ted Cruz and Katie Britt) is sort of a an attempt to create a “more palatable” version of KOSA, but which is still a censorship bill at its core.
KOSMA reared its ugly head again this morning in a Senate mark-up session and passed through it easily with Democrat support and no debate at all (barely even a mention of it). And even if some of that support may have been superficially pro forma, to move the Senate along so that it could get to addressing the larger issues at hand, any support was still too much support for what this bill proposes to do.
Because what this bill intentionally proposes to do is the same extreme thing that KOSA proposed to do: censor the internet for young people. And yet Congress would attempt to take such drastic legislative steps despite, or, in the case of the GOP supporters, perhaps because of, how much of an incursion it is on the rights of so many: the teenagers themselves, all the adult Internet users who will be impacted, and all the Internet speakers who now won’t be able to speak if this law hits the books.
When kids’ parents are being fired from government jobs, their friends rounded up, their schools forced to be racist, and the democracy they were promised to grow up in fully imperiled, it is the height of lunacy for any Democrat (looking at you, Senatosr Cantwell, Schatz & Murphy, but thankfully not you, Senator Markey) to think that they are thinking of the children by doing the Internet equivalent of banning their books. Not just because there are so many bigger fish to fry, especially right now, if we really cared about their interests, but because by censoring the Internet we are taking away everyone’s tools to be able to organize and fight the true danger at our door.
To support it is just dumb, in so many ways. After all, Democrats should know better: way too many had joined the push to ban TikTok, and we saw how stupidly (and unconstitutionally) that move worked out. And when the Trump Administration is blithely ignoring laws en masse it makes no sense to give his election denying henchman Pam Bondi and her DOJ a fresh new one that they can wield against anyone they see as a threat to Trumpian power. But all that is not even the end of problems with Democratic support for this bill.
The bigger problem Democrats need to recognize, and fast, is that it teaches the electorate—assuming we ever again have another free and fair election, which is currently not looking promising—that Democrats don’t really care very much about the Constitutional order Trump is actively destroying any more than he does. Which means that, for those who would want to resist this lawless president and his open threats to the limitations on government power the Constitution prescribes, there will be no one to vote for to stand up for its defense.
Because pushing these unconstitutional laws, or even simply nudging them through a markup session, especially while seeming to ignore the grossly unconstitutional actions of the Trump Administration, tells the public that if they want to choose someone who cares about the limitations the Constitution places on government power they can’t choose Democrats to respect them any more than they can choose anyone in the GOP. But without being able to elect either party to defend our democracy it will be game over for it. And the kids will now have an even bigger problem to deal with than the Internet.
