Just making the bulbs illegal, not banning them

Published March 20, 2012 4:00am ET



No, Barack Obama did not write or sign the light-bulb law, and so Mitt Romney was wrong to say “Obama’s regulators” had “banned Thomas Edison’s light bulb,” Washington Post factchecker Glenn Kessler points out rightly today.

But Kessler then makes the odd claim that nobody has banned Edison’s lightbulb — they just made it illegal to manufacture or import. Here’s Kessler’s claim:

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