The House Freedom Caucus began the Trump administration by saving Obamacare and now threatens to end the administration by harming national defense while trampling internet freedom. Few U.S. political groups have ever been so misnamed, and rarely have so-called conservatives so badly retarded conservative aims.
Freedom Caucus members say they plan to vote to uphold President Trump’s threatened veto of the annual National Defense Authorization Act, which is one of the few bills each year that is seen as bipartisan, “must-pass” legislation. Trump has said he will veto the NDAA if it does not contain a provision to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a part of that act that provides certain liability protections for internet platforms.
Trump’s threat is massively wrongheaded for numerous reasons. First, Section 230 is a good provision that in the next four years especially would protect conservative platforms from censorship. Second, Section 230 has precisely nothing to do with national defense and has no business being within light-years of discussions concerning the defense bill. Third, from a conservative standpoint, this version of the NDAA is almost sure to be a better one than what would emerge from a Biden administration with potentially fewer Republican senators than the 52 now in office.
To uphold a Trump veto would mean abject kowtowing to the petty grievances of an outgoing president, against the interests of both conservatism and country.
Trump wants Section 230 repealed because he thinks repeal will allow internet giants such as Facebook and Google to be punished for discrimination against Trumpian viewpoints. What he misses is that repeal would harm conservative-alternative platforms even more because many of them do not have the financial wherewithal to fight and win against harassing lawsuits from political enemies. Separately, Chris Cox and Rick Santorum (two of the finest conservative legislators of my lifetime, the former more economically libertarian and the latter more traditionalist) each have written convincingly that Section 230, which Cox originally authored, is a bulwark of internet freedom.
Still, even if Section 230 merited alteration, it is wildly inappropriate to make the NDAA contingent upon its repeal. Section 230 isn’t germane to the bill. Trump’s position is the equivalent of a governor saying he’ll stop funding state police unless legislators somehow punish a newspaper critical of the governor. It would put public safety at risk for the sake of the executive’s entirely unrelated private grudge.
The NDAA is meticulously crafted each year with the needs of national security front and center. Republican and Democratic members of Congress battle vociferously each year about which priorities to authorize, but the bill’s importance is so great that the parties almost always end up constructively compromising on the final product. Without timely passage of the NDAA, procurement and contracting for key weapons systems can be delayed, along with pay raises for troops and key initiatives to counter the influence of Russia, China, and terrorists.
Biden has a history (and family interests) far more compliant with China and far less supportive of national defense in general than Trump is. If Trump vetoes this version of the NDAA and Congress fails to override the veto, the next version will surely be designed with Biden’s preferences far more in mind. This is the same Biden who was on the dovish side of an already dovish Obama administration, one which consistently sought major cuts in defense spending.
How does it do the public any good for supposedly pro-defense conservatives to block a national defense bill and leave it to the weak-defense Biden team to have a say in its replacement?
If the Freedom Caucus supports Trump’s veto over an issue both nongermane and substantively counterproductive, thus putting national security at risk, it will undermine both internet freedom and the defense of freedom against international threats. The irresponsibility boggles the mind.
