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Washington, D.C. (February 12, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the full committee hearing on the First Amendment and censorship.

Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.

WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
House Judiciary Committee
Hearing on “The Censorship-Industrial Complex”
February 12, 2025

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to our witnesses. 

Mr. Chairman, the wrecking ball of authoritarian plutocracy is swinging right at Congress and our legislative powers and it’s swinging right through us at the freedom of the press and the freedom of the people. The self-appointed CEO of this operation is the unelected bureaucrat and aspiring techno-dictator Elon Musk, who Steve Bannon calls a “truly evil person,” seeking to create a post-constitutional corporate techno-state in which he’s king and most of us are reduced to the status of serfs. Break things and break things fast, Steve Bannon says, is Musk’s M.O. De facto President Musk and his nocturnal DOGE Muscovite Youth Brigade have now taken control of dozens of federal computer databases in order to dismantle entire federal agencies and programs that we in Congress created and funded with appropriations to keep our people safe and healthy. 

Just this week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that lowered overdraft fees from $38 to $5 and cut credit card late fees from an average of $32 to $8 for American consumers, saving us billions of dollars—an agency that has actually stopped corporate rip-off artists from stealing $21 billion from us—got a stop work order from the Administration. The billionaire plutocrats want to dismantle EPA, which protects clean air and water for our people, and the NIH, which promotes life-saving scientific and medical research. 

Yesterday, Donald Trump banned the Associated Press, a 179-year-old newspaper organization, from an event in the Oval Office because it declined to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. This is straight-up press censorship based on retaliatory viewpoint discrimination. It follows the news that Trump’s Department of Defense recently kicked out eight news organizations that had permanent space in the Pentagon but which asked skeptical questions of the new Secretary of Defense—including the New York Times, NBC News, and the Washington Post, all ousted in favor of outlets willing to faithfully advance the party line like Breitbart and One America News Network.  

I despair sometimes when I reflect how far this war on representative democracy and the rights of the press and the people has already gone and how far it might go.

But then, Mr. Chairman, I think about you.

I think about you because you and I, a MAGA Republican and a liberal Democrat, have always shared a common commitment to the First Amendment. This gives me hope. As you’ve put it: “The First Amendment is first for a reason. Without it, we cannot enjoy our other liberties.” So I tell myself that, well, if things get really bad here, if we begin to look like Orban’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary or Putin’s Russia, where journalists end up in prison for their writings, young people are jailed for expressing antiwar sentiments and opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny are poisoned and die mysteriously in jail, or Kim Jong Un’s North Korea or Xi’s China, authoritarian dictatorships where all must worship the orders of the dear, deified leader, I will call upon you as a colleague, whom I have known to work seriously across the aisle sometimes, to come defend political freedom in America.

These are dark times, but, in the past, we’ve agreed strongly on the fundamental importance of free speech, free press, the right of peaceful assembly and protest, the right to petition for redress of grievances, free exercise of religion and no establishment of a State religion. I’m proud we worked together to move the PRESS Act, which passed this Committee unanimously and passed the House by voice vote last Congress to protect reporters against compulsory disclosure of their notes and sources. And you supported me in my Resolution against Blasphemy laws around the world used to torment Christians, Hindus, Muslims and freethinkers everywhere. 

We have clashed vigorously and will, no doubt, continue to do so through this hard period, but forgive me if I quote Abraham Lincoln, the great founder of your party, who said “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” I hope we can call on these bonds if Elon Musk or anyone else in the Executive Branch seeks to destroy our constitutional freedoms and the powers of Congress. 

Although this hearing has been arranged to belabor a rather tiresome point that has been made ad nauseum for the last several years, it actually gestures at an important issue, specifically whether social media platforms like Meta and X should be treated as common carriers and pushed to be open to all speakers and all speech content, regardless of how dangerous or false it may be, or whether they should be seen as private speakers who have the freedom to exclude any content that violates their own policies, the way that newspapers and TV stations do.

It’s a fascinating problem but it’s clear, as a matter of law, these are private entities and speakers who control their own speech, despite the fact that they are protected by Section 230, which immunizes them from liability for other people’s defamation, fraud, and other criminal and tortious communications posted on their platforms. The status of Section 230 is something we’ve discussed that we should seriously examine in a thoughtful way, since the internet has clearly gotten off the ground and doesn’t need this kind of subsidy anymore. 

What I insist on now is only that we be consistent in our treatment of the tech giants. You pushed them hard, Mr. Chairman, to remove objective fact-checking and to let extreme right-wing forces post freely. You pushed for an absolute and wide-open market in speech. But then you should push them equally hard not to censor dissenting viewpoints, whether they come from the anti-immigration wing of the MAGA movement, like Steven Bannon or Laura Loomer, who says she has been shadow-banned on X by Elon Musk, or from the populist Left, as when Musk purged his platform of accounts critical of the X owner back in 2022. Even one of my Republican colleagues’ own witnesses, Mr. Taibbi, was privately censored or de-amplified by Elon Musk, and I assume must walk on eggshells now in order not to get kicked off of that platform, but I’ll be interested to hear what he says about it. But if you use our Congressional bully pulpit to stand up for the rights of extreme right-wing speakers on the internet, you should stand up for the rights of anti-Musk speakers on the internet too.

But right now, the issue is this: we face a profound First Amendment crisis in the systematic actions taken by the Administration.

One of my constituents who is serving in the armed forces alerted me this past Friday to book bans by the government at their kids’ Department of Defense school, where they are closing their library for a week to complete a purge of books that appear to offend the new government orthodoxy against “DEI” and “Gender Ideology.” That’s fine if you hate those ideologies, whatever you think they are, but this is naked content and viewpoint censorship of books. I hope you would join me in denouncing the purge of books, the stripping of books from the Department of Defense libraries or any other public libraries in America or for American citizens. When this parent saw a school official removing not just books but posters of Susan B. Anthony and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., my constituent asked why the poster of Leonardo DaVinci was not being taken down and was told, “he’s a real historical figure.”  

More sweepingly, Donald Trump and his FCC are using their powers to investigate, sue, and threaten news groups that dare to criticize the Administration. Trump is suing CBS for $20 billion in damages because—check this out—he believes an interview with Kamala Harris produced too favorable an impression of her. Does that mean I can sue Fox News because I think their interviews with Trump produce too favorable an impression on that audience? This is lunacy. 

And now exploiting his asserted “unitary executive” powers, Trump is unleashing his sycophant FCC Chairman, Brendan Carr, on every news group whose news stories he does not approve of—actually threatening to pull the broadcast licenses for ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and NPR. Nothing of a hostile nature has taken place against Fox News, which is now de facto state-approved media and enjoys immunity from the repression visited unfairly on its liberal competitors. Is this North Korea?  

It reminds me of the treatment of Donald Trump’s former private lawyer, Michael Cohen, who worked for Trump for more than a decade and became deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. Then he went to jail for Donald Trump for, among other things, lying to Congress and making an unlawful corporate contribution in the Stormy Daniels cover-up affair. When Cohen was released from prison during COVID-19 to home arrest and probation, he was abruptly rearrested and taken back to prison when he refused to sign a statement saying he would not speak to the media or publish his book or about Donald Trump. He was thrown into solitary confinement where he remained until a United States District Court Judge found this to be clear First Amendment violation and ordered that he be released immediately. What is this—Castro’s Cuba, Putin’s Russia?  

The free speech violations taking place now against Department of Justice prosecutors and FBI agents are equally astounding. The First Amendment forbids official reprisal and punishment against professional government employees for political reasons. Yet Trump has fired and demoted dozens of federal prosecutors, many of whom were promoted by Trump during his first Administration, simply for doing their jobs, including prosecuting January 6 violators. Trump’s subordinates also asked for a roundup of information about more than 6,000 hard-working FBI agents who were assigned to the January 6 probe—a dangerous, blatantly unconstitutional order which was enjoined by a U.S. District Court in a case brought by the FBI Agents Association.

The Administration is attempting to do its work in secret, keeping the press, Congress, and the people in the dark. I know you feel as strongly about government transparency as you do about free speech. The Administration has illegally fired 17 Inspectors General, totally violating the statute which says they’ve got to come to Congress first 30 days before they fire them and set forth the specific explanation for why that’s happening. 

Now, you and I are both fierce advocates for the First Amendment and government transparency. Both of us see in the First Amendment a right that protects everybody without regard to viewpoint, substance or politics of the message. And if we stand up strong for the First Amendment, if we defend not just the speech we agree with, which is easy, but the speech we oppose, which is hard, then we will be constitutional patriots, and we will protect a truly free society. 

When we together introduced our Free Flow of Information Act, you said “[a]ll rights protected in the First Amendment need to be defended.” We had real success. Let’s work together again to end the attacks on news organizations, to demand transparency from the Administration and to allow every American to exercise his or her free speech without being intimidated, harassed, or prosecuted. 

Thank you, and I yield back.