Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (R-Ohio), reprimanded a Democratic member on Thursday at a hearing for suggesting that First Amendment-protected free speech has “limits.”
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) said the committee is “chilling the federal government” in order to “undermine” what he saw to be the severity of the Capitol Building riot on January 6, 2021, which sparked a heated debate during the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing.
“We all agree with the First Amendment, but the problem is that the First Amendment is not absolute. It does not protect any single thing anyone says, and there are limits, and that’s important,” Goldman said. “And what this committee has been trying to do for the last year and a half is to chill the federal government for monitoring what is going on on social media and otherwise out there so that misinformation and disinformation can run rampant on Elon Musk’s social platform and every other social platform so that they, the Republicans, can benefit from it in the November election.
“That’s why this committee exists, and we have gotten no evidence to support any of these allegations,” Goldman claimed.
“I believe the New Yorker recently mentioned that we’re attempting to undermine the federal government. That’s always “the government trying to chill Americans’ rights and chill Americans,” I don’t know if it’s ever been said that way. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Jordan remarked.
However, do you know who objected to the way the FBI and Bank of America handled this request for information? Who do you know was against it? Three agents from the FBI. “The men on the case…” Thus, even the FBI, which routinely mistreated Americans. Jordan went on, “The FBI declared that everybody who supports life in the Catholic Church is an extreme, and anyone who is a parent attending a school board meeting is a terrorist.
Journalist Matt Taibbi’s “The Twitter Files” revealed that the FBI warned Twitter executives about possible state actors attempting to meddle in the election. The New York Post’s account was restricted for many days after their story on the laptop was classified as “Russian disinformation.”
The U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear a case last autumn that would determine the extent to which the government of the United States can compel social media companies to censor or suppress particular material.
In a lawsuit brought against the Biden administration by Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana, the states sought to restrict the federal government’s power to pressure social media companies like Facebook, X, and YouTube to stifle certain information without actually telling them to.
The high court announced that it had granted a writ of certiorari in this case. That would be a clear First Amendment violation against the right to free speech, according to both states.