If You Believe In Free Speech, The GOP’s “Weaponization” Subcommittee Is Not Your Friend

Politics," the writer Auberon Waugh liked to say, is for social and emotional misfits." Its purpose is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power." You could accuse old Bron of painting with a rather broad brush, and you would be right. But he plainly understood the likes of Kevin McCarthy. As the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus observed last week, two aspects of McCarthy's bid to become Speaker of the House stand out. First, that he seems to crave power for power's sake, not for any higher purposes." And second, that he is willing to debase himself so completely to obtain it."

Of the many concessions McCarthy made to his far-right flank to obtain the Speaker's gavel, one of the most straightforward was to create a new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The desire for such an entity percolat[ed] on the edges of the [party] conference and conservative media," Politico reported last month, and the calls for it then quickly spread, getting harder for the speaker hopeful to ignore." But the hardliners were pushing at an open door: McCarthy had already been promising sweeping investigations of the Department of Justice and the FBI.

It's amusing that the subcommittee is simply on" weaponization, leaving onlookers the latitude to decide for themselves whether the body's position is pro" or con." The subcommittee will likely seek to disrupt the executive branch's probes of Donald Trump's interference in the 2020 election, role in the Capitol attack, and defiant mishandling of classified documents. It might also seek to hinder the government's efforts to prosecute Jan. 6 rioters. In attempting to obstruct federal law enforcement, the House GOP would be engaging in its own forms of weaponization." It would be trying to weaponize" its own authority-which, under our Constitution's separation of powers, does not extend to meddling in ongoing criminal investigations. And it would be trying to weaponize" the federal government by compelling it not to enforce the law. A better label might have been the Select Subcommittee on Weaponizing the Federal Government Our Way." Or, for brevity's sake, perhaps Partisan Hacks Against the Rule of Law."

It is in this light that we must view another of the subcommittee's main goals-getting to the very bottom" (McCarthy's words) of the federal government's relationship with Big Tech. Last month Rep. Jim Jordan, the incoming chair of the House Judiciary Committee-and, now, of its weaponization" subcommittee as well-accused the major tech firms of being out to get conservatives." He demanded that those firms preserve records of their collusion' with the Biden administration to censor conservatives on their platforms." According to Axios, the subcommittee will demand copies of White House emails, memos and other communications with Big Tech companies."

There is nothing inherently wrong with setting up a congressional committee to investigate whether and how the government is influencing online speech and content moderation. After all, Congress has good reason to care about what the government itself is saying, especially if the government is using its own speech to violate the Free Speech Clause. Congress has a constitutional duty to oversee (though not intrude on) the executive branch's faithful execution of the laws Congress has passed.

Lately, moreover, the executive branch has indeed displayed an unhealthy desire to control constitutionally protected expression. Government officials now routinely jawbone social media platforms over content moderation. There were Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's guidelines on health misinformation," issued-the platforms may have noticed-amid a push by the Biden administration to expose platforms to litigation over misinformation" by paring back their Section 230 protection. Biden's then-Press Secretary Jen Psaki announced that the administration was flagging posts for platforms to remove. What's worse, she declared that a ban from one social media platform should trigger a ban from all platforms. And then there was the notorious Disinformation Governance Board"-a body whose name was dystopian, whose powers were ill-defined, whose rollout was ham-fisted, and whose brief existence unsettled all but the most sanguine proponents of government power. It can hardly be said that there's nothing worth investigating.

The First Amendment bars the government from censoring speech it doesn't like-even speech that might be called misinformation." The state may try to influence speech indirectly-it is allowed, within limits, to express its opinion about others' speech-but that doesn't mean doing so is a good idea. The government shouldn't be telling social media platforms what content to allow, much as it shouldn't be telling newspapers what stories to print.

Misguided though they may be, however, none of the government's efforts-to this point-have violated the First Amendment. The government has not ordered platforms to remove or ban specific content. It has not issued threats that rise to the level of government coercion. And it has not co-opted the platforms in a manner that would turn them into state actors. If anything, the right's ongoing lawsuits alleging otherwise have helped reveal a quite different problem: that the platforms are all too receptive to government input. But agreeing with the government does not make one's actions attributable to the government.

The Twitter Files"-which helped inspire, and will drive much of, the subcommittee's investigation-change precisely none of this. Much misunderstood and even more misrepresented, the information released via Elon Musk's surrogates actually undercuts the narrative that the federal government is dictating the platforms' editorial decisions.

We were promised evidence that the FBI and the federal government conspired with platforms to squash the Hunter Biden laptop story. Instead, we learned-as Twitter Files" player Matt Taibbi himself put it-that there's no evidence ... of any government involvement." Messages to Twitter sent by the Biden campaign, we were told, amounted to a bona fide First Amendment violation. But a non-state actor lobbying a non-state actor does not a state action make. Such lobbying by political campaigns is common-and, in many instances, even proper. (Many of the tweets the Biden campaign flagged contained links to leaked nude photos of Hunter Biden. Even political candidates may try to defend their families' privacy.)

Yet another Twitter Files" document dump showed Twitter receiving payments from the FBI. This, we heard, definitively revealed the Grand Conspiracy to Censor Conservatives. Except that the payments were simply statutorily mandated reimbursements for expenses Twitter incurred replying to court-ordered requests for investigatory information.

So although there might well be issues regarding government jawboning worth investigating, you can be forgiven for doubting that the House GOP, proceeding through its weaponization" subcommittee, is up to the task of seriously investigating them. Judging from past performance, the Republicans who control the body will use its hearings to emit great waves of impotent, performative, largely unintelligible sound. The yells and animal noises" of parliamentary debates, Auberon Waugh wrote, have nothing to do with principles or policy. They are cries of pain and anger, mingled with hatred and envy, at the spectacle of another group exercising the power' which the first group covets." That will describe Republican-run Big Tech hearings to a tee.

The GOP is not fighting to stop so-called censorship"; it's fighting to stop so-called censorship" performed by those they dislike. When Musk suspended some journalists from Twitter-on trumped up charges, no less-many on the right responded with whoops of glee. That Musk had just engaged in precisely the sort of conduct those pundits had long denounced was of no consequence. Indeed, when some on the left pointed out that the suspensions were arbitrary, impulsive, and imposed under false pretenses, their remarks launched a thousand conservative op-eds crowing about progressive hypocrisy. (There should be a long German word for shouting Hypocrite!" at someone as you pass by him on the flip-flop road.)

Choking on outrage, the contemporary political right has descended into practicing Who, whom?" politics of the crassest sort. House Republicans have no problem with weaponizing" the government, so long as they're the ones doing the weaponizing." This explains how they can rail against a government campaign to reduce COVID misinformation on social media while also arguing that Section 230, the law that gives social media platforms the legal breathing room to host sketchy content to begin with, should be scrapped.

If you believe for one moment that Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, and their myrmidons truly support free speech on the Internet, we've got beachfront property in Kansas to sell you. There was no limit to Waugh's disdain for such men. Until the public accepts that the urge to power is a personality disorder in its own right," he said, like the urge to sexual congress with children or the taste for rubber underwear, there will always be a danger of circumstances arising which persuade ordinary people to start listening to politicians ... and taking them seriously." A bit over the top, to be sure-though not in this case.