In a sure sign of our topsy-turvy political times, Democrats in the US Senate and House of Representatives are sponsoring legislation that seeks both to rein in the reach of federal regulatory authority and to promote the fundamental First Amendment value that expression of all viewpoints should be allowed rather than squelched and punished by government decree. Unsurprisingly, it took the words and actions––real and potential––of President Donald Trump and his designee to chair the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, to provoke this through-the-looking-glass landscape. There’s sufficient irony here to move Alanis Morissette, especially given the Biden administration’s jawboning efforts to silence conservative and dissenting viewpoints on social media platforms that were at issue in 2024 before the US Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri.
This analysis begins with the legislation and then describes some of the statements and actions that spawned it. It concludes by pointing out regulatory ironies involving both the political left and right.
The Bills. Dubbed the “Broadcast Freedom and Independence Act of 2025,” Senate Bill 867 and a companion House measure were announced last month in press releases issued by their lead sponsors, Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), ranking member of the Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Media, and Representative Doris Matsui (D-Cal.), ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. The bills are directed at statutorily preventing the FCC from revoking the licenses of (and otherwise punishing) over-the-air broadcasters “on the basis, in whole or in part, of viewpoints broadcast or otherwise disseminated.” They also would ban the FCC from conditioning approval of license transfers and assignments based on the “viewpoints broadcast or otherwise disseminated by the person seeking that approval” or others affiliated with the person. Finally, the measures’ factual findings emphasize the importance of the FCC’s status as an independent agency that must carry “out its mission without political pressure or intimidation” and establish its own “priorities and agenda.”
The Impetus for the Bills. The legislation’s motivation is rooted in the Trump-Carr alliance and a Trump executive order seeking to bring the FCC firmly under his control by requiring “so-called independent agencies” to submit for presidential “review all proposed and final significant regulatory actions.” Trump has asserted that “CBS should lose its license, and the cheaters at 60 Minutes should all be thrown out” based on the editing of a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris. To be clear, station owners hold licenses; CBS thus only has licenses for stations it owns, not ones for all affiliates. Trump sued CBS over the 60 Minutes interview, while Carr reinstated a previously dismissed FCC investigation into (and opened a new docket seeking public comment on) whether CBS’s editing of Harris’s interview violated the Commission’s rule against broadcast news distortion. Indicating possible political bias that Carr denies, the FCC also reinstated previously jettisoned investigations into stations affiliated with the ABC and NBC television networks but not one involving a complaint against a Fox station.
Collectively, such actions bolster Luján’s assertion that “[t]he Trump administration’s weaponization of the FCC and intimidation of broadcast stations for political purposes is a serious threat to the First Amendment.” Luján contends that neither the FCC nor the president should possess “the power to revoke broadcasting licenses and censor free speech simply because they disagree with the viewpoints that are broadcasted.” Indeed, viewpoint discrimination by the government presumptively violates the First Amendment.
Carr’s reopening of the news-distortion complaint against CBS while also calling for public comment on the network’s actions was derided as “a political stunt” by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a non-partisan free-speech defender. FIRE claims Carr is creating “an illegitimate show trial” and that “asking members of the public to ‘vote’ on how they feel about a news organization’s editorial policies is both pointless and constitutionally infirm.”
Final Thoughts. The Democrats’ Broadcast Freedom and Independence Act of 2025 is largely symbolic because Republicans control both the House and Senate. Compounding the irony noted earlier is that one of the Senate bill’s co-sponsors, Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.), has long supported net neutrality. It involves heavy-handed, common-carrier regulation by the FCC of internet service providers (ISPs). Earlier this year, Markey criticized a federal court decision thwarting the FCC’s Biden-era efforts to enforce net neutrality policies on ISPs by reclassifying them as telecommunications services. In short, Markey wants to expand FCC regulatory authority in one domain (the internet) but not in another (broadcasting).
The ironic flipside is that conservatives now are vigorously and expansively deploying the FCC’s public interest regulatory power and news distortion policy to police the actions of businesses like CBS rather than adopting the light-touch regulatory stance they prefer on matters like net neutrality. As Alice described events in Wonderland, matters involving the FCC are growing curiouser and curiouser.