Undaunted

First Amendment Heroes

Donald Trump, whose frail ego and isolation from reality demand unceasing praise and undiluted “good news,” has intensified his unremitting, blatantly unconstitutional assault on the First Amendment on multiple fronts against law firms, universities, individual critics, news outlets, and progressive groups. Fortunately, heroic defenders of the First Amendment continue to stand up to the bully in chief.

Anna Gomez, a Democratic commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), went on social media (putting her position at risk, given the president’s power granted by the MAGA Supreme Court majority to fire independent commissioners at will) to rebuke Trump for threatening NBC News’s Kristen Welker for remarks about his mixed record on midterm endorsements.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez. (Xuthoria via Wikimedia Commons)

“As I’ve said many times, the FCC has no authority to punish journalists this administration doesn’t like,” Gomez said on X. “These threats to press freedom are dangerous. They undermine the foundation of our democracy, and they have no place in it.”

In May, Gomez defended The Walt Disney Co. in a lengthy letter “documenting the record of this Administration’s campaign of censorship and control against Disney, calling out the FCC’s double standard in its selective enforcement against the company, and encouraging Disney to continue fighting.” (Disney sued the FCC in August to challenge an investigation/review of ABC’s broadcast licenses.)

In another corner of the executive branch, a brave American stepped forward to disclose damning evidence of wrongdoing at the core of Trump’s effort to disrupt mail-in voting and rig the election. The New York Times reported:

A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.

The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The report said that the agency had planned to complete the new digital system overseeing mail ballots by Sept. 1.

The courage required to bring such vital information to the public (and to the federal court in advance of Thursday’s hearing on an injunction to stop the scheme) is breathtaking. (“The whistle-blower report provided specific details of the Postal Service’s effort to rapidly implement a new digital system for mail ballots, even as a federal appeals court had blocked the plan before the Supreme Court intervened. Work has also continued on the system even after Judge Talwani ordered the plan halted last week, the report said.”)

Without factual detail of this type illustrating how thousands of ballots might be summarily rejected and just how incompetently and sloppily the system under consideration has been thrown together, the scheme might have succeeded. However, at Thursday morning’s hearing in Federal District Court in Boston, the facts raised in the whistleblower’s report fueled scathing questioning from Judge Indira Talwani as to how the government could possibly implement sweeping new rules that risked disenfranchising millions of voters. Plainly, the DOJ’s inability to respond to the whistleblower’s account of haphazard, half-baked rules with no clear direction for the Post Office “exasperated” the judge, as the New York Times reported. (“So we’re going to do a test run on this election? We’re not playing an intellectual puzzle game,” she told the DOJ lawyer. “We’re talking about people’s right to vote.”) Talwani appeared poised to block the plan.

In another stalwart defense of the First Amendment, Judge Rita Lin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California last week wrote a stinging 59-page opinion striking down the Pentagon order that “designated Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security, ordered all federal agencies to permanently stop using Anthropic’s products, and banned all defense contractors from doing any business with Anthropic, even if unrelated to the military.”

Observing that the Trump regime dropped any pretense that Anthropic posed a concrete security risk, Lin wrote:

Defendants claim that because of Anthropic’s “increasingly hostile manner through the press” and its criticism of the Department of War’s views on AI use, Defendants “cannot trust Anthropic to ensure the integrity of its models.” Neither the Constitution nor the federal statute invoked by Defendants allows them to impose sweeping penalties based principally on Anthropic’s critique of the Administration’s views.

In calling out classic viewpoint discrimination, Lin slammed the Trump team for trying to “make an example of Anthropic for its public stance on the weighty issues at stake in the contracting dispute” in retaliation for criticism of Trump’s regime. Castigating authoritarian bullying that relies on pretext and innuendo to punish critics, Lin held that “the broad measures imposed on Anthropic were illegal and baseless,” concluding, “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics.”

It’s more important than ever, when a petulant dictator is bent on making examples of his enemies and throwing around the full weight of the government to punish its critics, for private actors to rally in support. So long as the Trump goons can pick off one foe after another, no one is safe.

On Tuesday, over 150 organizations signed on to a letter in a remarkable show of support for the Center for American Progress (CAP), a nonpartisan think tank, denouncing Trump’s personal lawyer’s threat to sue CAP for $5 billion if it did not retract an evidence-based report showing no measurable reduction in crime from the National Guard deployments.

The group’s recitation of the First Amendment’s key role in protecting our freedom is a model for others:

We reaffirm, as has each generation before us, our unqualified commitment to the First Amendment and its foundational protections. In so doing, we stand in strong solidarity with the Center for American Progress (CAP), a nonpartisan think tank, and its right to publish expert analysis on the impact of the Trump administration’s—or any administration’s—policies. The free exchange of ideas—including ideas that are inconvenient to those in power—is critical for Americans to understand the nature and impact of the actions of their government.

The organizations candidly condemned Trump’s attack as “the latest salvo in the Administration’s ongoing efforts to suppress the speech of organizations that challenge their policies, defend the rule of law and protect civil rights and vulnerable communities.” Noting that any effort to silence “our free exchange of ideas … risks leaving only distortions in the public square,” the signatories, eschewing differences in ideology or partisanship, reaffirmed that there are “few issues more fundamental to the First Amendment than the right of an independent organization to publish evidence-based analysis of a government policy and how it is or is not working.”

Make no mistake: We are in perilous times when it comes to Trump’s full assault on the First Amendment. Pointing to the “loop of censorship and shilling,” Margaret Sullivan observed, “The bigger picture is that Trump is freaking out, and trying desperately to weaken the messenger. As the midterm elections loom in just two months, he is saddled with a failed war, high gas prices, and a bottom-dwelling approval rating.”

It therefore is more urgent than ever for democracy advocates in all branches of government and in civil society to rise up in defense of free expression against a petulant bully spinning out of control, ever more desperate to cling to power and stomp out criticism. Undaunted, unafraid, unbowed, and uncompromising in their defense of free expression, these First Amendment champions deserve our gratitude.

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