Cruz wants to make it easier for Americans to get damages for government censorship

Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX) was one of a handful of Republicans to speak out against the “mafioso”-like comments Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr issued ahead of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension last month. Now, he’s hoping the liberal outrage over government censorship will fuel bipartisan support for a new bill letting Americans sue over speech violations. 

Cruz plans to introduce the bill in the coming weeks, he told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. The bill would introduce new procedures for cases where people believe they’ve been censored by the government, making it easier for them to sue for monetary damages. It would include exceptions for government investigations, and carve out unprotected speech like nonconsensual intimate imagery. Cruz plans to host a series of hearings focused on government censorship that will include Carr, he told the Journal.

Carr made his statements on a podcast after Kimmel included a joke about Charlie Kirk’s killer in a late-night monologue, telling TV networks that they could take “the easy way or the hard way” — the latter involving FCC action —  to get Kimmel off the air. (His show was pulled and then reinstated by Disney.)  Cruz criticized the FCC chair’s comments as “right out of Goodfellas.” Even if Cruz was sympathetic to the desire to see Kimmel off the air, he warned, “It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”

Cruz had been working on the upcoming bill even before Kirk’s death, according to the Journal, but after hearing support from Democratic colleagues for speaking out against Carr, he sees an opportunity to find common ground. “Perhaps that poses an opportunity for us to work together in a bipartisan way,” Cruz told the Journal. 

Still, some of Cruz’s targets are likely to make Democrats bristle and raise questions about how the law might be used. Late last month, he released a report accusing the Biden administration of turning the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “into an agent of censorship pressuring Big Tech to police speech.” On Wednesday, the Commerce Committee hosted an event where Cruz claimed the Biden administration had pressured social media platforms to deplatform witnesses for skepticism around COVID and mail-in voting.

The Supreme Court last year reversed a lower court decision that found the Biden administration had unconstitutionally coerced platforms to remove such content, writing that there was not “any concrete link” between the Biden administration’s communication with tech platforms and the companies’ own decisions.

There’s no love lost between Cruz and Kimmel, despite his supportive comments about the comedian’s suspension. While the senator told the Journal he’d be open to going on Kimmel’s show to discuss the forthcoming bill, he added that the late night host isn’t funny, and gloated that before Kimmel’s suspension, “my podcast was kicking Kimmel’s ass every week.”