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On Halloween night, when the two leading contenders for the U.S. Senate seat on this year’s Missouri ballot hold their second and final debate, moderators have an opportunity to conduct a radical thought experiment.
The hosts of the Nexstar televised event could ask U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, the Republican incumbent, and his Democratic challenger, Lucas Kunce, to consider the possibility that one of the presidential candidates actually means what he says, and ask what they would do when he tries to pull broadcast licenses of networks he doesn’t like or throw journalists in jail for refusing to identify their sources.
Both Hawley and Kunce are running for a seat in a body that’s designed to be a check on presidential power; so far, at least, neither has seemed willing to criticize, much less check, the presidential candidate in question.
Hawley’s fanboy relationship with Donald Trump is infamously enshrined in the photograph of him giving a raised-fist salute to the former president’s supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before they stormed the U.S. Capitol. It’s undoubtedly the reason so many contributors from across the country have been pouring money into Kunce’s coffers, despite his underdog status in the race.
Yet when Hawley repeatedly baited Kunce to say for whom he’ll be voting in the presidential race, Kunce refused to say.
“Will it be Kamala Harris or will it be Donald Trump?” the senator asked.
Kunce: “I will work with anyone in the U.S. Senate to bring money back to Missouri.”
This does not inspire a lot of confidence that either man will be willing to stand up for the First Amendment before a president who seems to be seeking a mandate to dismantle it.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
I’ve covered five presidents and countless presidential candidates. All of them have found the press nettlesome and have tried in different ways to hamstring reporters in order to control the message.
To make this bipartisan: Barack Obama was especially subpoena-happy with reporters, triggering an organized pushback by civil liberties and press freedom groups that resulted in an emphatic reversal of policy by President Joe Biden.
But the protections Biden extended against fishing expeditions for reporters’ notes and sources easily could be reversed unless they are codified into law by the bipartisan reporters’ shield bill, which passed the House unanimously and is now languishing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, bottled up by one of Hawley’s fellow Republicans, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
Hawley is a member of that committee. Will he help to try to bring this important measure to the Senate floor? What would Kunce’s position on the bill be were he to become a senator? More good questions for the debate moderators to consider.
Trump’s backers insist his repeated attacks on press freedom are all bluster and hyperbole. That rosy view doesn’t jibe with the reality of his first term in the White House.
Not only did Trump use the terms of totalitarianism (“enemies of the people”) to attack reporters, provoking some supporters to physical violence against the press. He also used the power of his office to punish critics in the media. Trump threatened to raise taxes on Amazon in a fairly bald move against its owner, also the owner of The Washington Post. He tried to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger out of spite against CNN. Then there was the time the Trump White House tried to ban an accredited reporter whose questions the then-president didn’t like.
Most shamefully, Trump tried to turn Voice of America and its sister news organizations, globally respected agencies that are funded by the U.S. taxpayers and dedicated to broadcasting truth into countries where it’s in short supply, into a political propaganda arm.
Late in Trump’s presidency, his appointee to head the U.S. Agency for Government Media, Michael Pack, refused to renew visas of VOA reporters who had been recruited to broadcast to their home countries in their native languages. Some were faced with the possibility of having to return to places where many now have targets on their backs because they worked for Uncle Sam.
Fortunately, the end of Trump’s term put an abrupt end to Pack’s reign of terror at VOA. But if Trump is re-elected, would the Senate confirm Pack for his old job? How carefully will the Senate vet the president’s nominee to that important post? Will senators sit by and allow VOA and Radio Free Europe to be turned into Trump TV? These are all good questions for Hawley and Kunce.
The founders who wrote and ratified the First Amendment did so in response to a king and British Parliament that tried to quash dissenters by putting them in jail and taking away their right to assemble, their ability to publish and, via the infamous Stamp Act, to limit their ability to disseminate what they had published.
What will members of the United States Congress do if confronted with a president who tries the same? Voters deserve to know.
Because, as the founders understood, the freedom that will be threatened isn’t just that of a publisher or reporter.
It’s yours.