With Jerry Moran, you take what you can get.
It would be nice, for example, to see Kansas’ senior senator take a bold stand for the First Amendment and against President Donald Trump’s crackdown on free speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
That’s not quite what we got from Moran after ABC suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel last week under pressure from the Trump administration. (Disney announced Monday the show will return to the air on Tuesday.)
“We all should be very cautious,” Moran told Politico. “The conservative position is free speech is free speech, and we better be very careful about any lines we cross in diminishing free speech.”
And, well, it’s better than nothing.
But you don’t have to look very far to see stronger statements from some of Moran’s fellow Senate conservatives, who see the danger in letting any government — Democratic or Republican — decide what kind of speech is permissible.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, for example, said it was “dangerous as hell” for Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr to demand that ABC take Kimmel off the airwaves.
“If the government gets in the business of saying, ‘We don’t like what you, the media, have said; we’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like’ — that will end up bad for conservatives,” Cruz said.
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, meanwhile, didn’t mind seeing Kimmel go by the wayside, but on NBC he said “the FCC was wrong to weigh in” on Kimmel’s job future.
“I’ll fight any attempt by the government to get involved with speech, I will fight,” Paul added.
See? It can be done.
Making excuses for a crackdown If Moran’s reaction to the Kimmel suspension was too mild for my tastes, though, it was still better than what his Kansas and Missouri colleagues offered.
During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas made excuses for the FCC.
“The FCC didn’t fire” Kimmel, Marshall said. “He was fired because he was ignorant, that he had inflammatory remarks, bad ratings, and those types of things.”
That ignores, of course, that Carr last week publicly told ABC affiliates that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and that there would be “additional work for the FCC ahead” if the network didn’t crack down on Kimmel.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri walked a weird middle ground — defending Kimmel’s right to say dumb stuff while also applauding the suspension.
