A Masterclass in Regulatory Abuse

Why aren’t voters outraged over the FCC’s abuse of its power against opponents? The editors of the WSJ discuss the abuse of power emanating from Brendan Carr’s FCC

The voters – the swarth of deplorables – who have backed Donald Trump are now looking for payback, say the editors. For over a decade, middle-class America has been subjected to media and entertainment coastal elites heaping contempt on the values middle America holds dear.

Regulatory power in the hands of a willful President can too easily become a weapon against political opponents, including the media.

Last Wednesday, in the wake of the Charlie Kirk tragedy, Carr, Donald Trump’s man heading the FCC, threatened Disney and its affiliates if they didn’t punish late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for comments about murdered Charlie Kirk.

Serious Government Overreach

Brendan Carr threatened the over-the-air licenses of ABC affiliates unless the network acted against late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for a stupid remark about the Charlie Kirk’s killing. As most readers know, parent company Disney acquiesced Wednesday, putting Mr. Kimmel’s show on indefinite hiatus, reports the WSJ’s Holman W. Jenkins.

Like a NJ Mob Boss

 Sounding not unlike a Mafioso character from “The Godfather,” Carr told a podcaster,

“We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way,”

Disney Suspends Kimmel Indefinitely 

Backed with the power behind broadcast licenses, the threat had teeth, allows the WSJ.

Nexstar Media, owner of TV stations that are part of the ABC network, has an acquisition that will go before the agency. After Mr. Carr’s threat, Nexstar announced it would drop Mr. Kimmel’s show from its lineup “for the foreseeable future.” Disney, which owns ABC, then suspended the Kimmel show “indefinitely.”

For Disney, #1 Is Shareholders + Its Brand 

As a private company, Disney has the right to run or cancel shows as it wishes. Perhaps in this case it saw pressure from government as an excuse to drop Mr. Kimmel, who had turned his show into a daily anti-Trump diatribe. But anyone who thinks this is the free market at work is ignoring the ways government can punish companies. Disney’s executives had to look out for the best interests of their shareholders and the Disney brand.

A Race to the Bottom 

What if a willful administration pursues retribution against political opponents? No surprise, here. According to Andrew McCarthy in NRO, Trump has not been solely responsible for the rule of law’s erosion. Look to history, urges McCarthy:

• Kennedy and Johnson leveraged the FBI, wiretaps, and tax records to coerce businesses and spy on rivals, journalists, anti-war activists, and MLK, Jr.
• Next came Nixon and Watergate.
• Obama’s innovation was “phone and pen” governance: A president who can’t get his way with Congress uses the administrative state to work his will. He and Biden (the third Obama term) forged the template.

Trump is exploiting: a dual perversion of prosecutorial discretion and equal protection of law. The former used to be an unremarkable resource-allocation doctrine:

There is more crime than prosecutorial resources, so priorities must guide decisions on what cases to bring. Obama refashioned prosecutorial discretion into a negation of the president’s duty to execute the laws faithfully. Decisions were based not on how best to enforce Congress’s laws but on how to affect the president’s will regarding what the law should be, subordinating the law to executive fiat. When Trump, without any justification, refuses to enforce the TikTok divestment statute (which mandates sale by the platform’s China-controlled owner), he walks a well-trodden path.

Equal protection, the principle that justice is blind, simultaneously gave way to the demonization of political opponents, gussied up as “social justice” (in the service of Democrats’ racial obsessions, economic distortions, climate alarmism, and sundry fetishes). Obama sicced the prosecutors and regulators on conservative organizations, gun retailers, police departments, etc. Biden’s lawfare aimed to bankrupt, incarcerate, and politically annihilate Trump, the Democrats’ archnemesis.

By early 2024, with the Republican nomination all but sewn up, Trump was reeling from half a billion dollars in civil verdicts. In a due process travesty led by the Biden Department of Justice and Democratic state district attorneys, he was looking at four potential criminal trials, queued up to chain him to courtrooms until Election Day. With cases steered to heavily Democratic jury pools, at least one preelection conviction seemed inevitable. (Trump was indeed convicted in Manhattan, in an absurd case involving hush money paid to a porn star.)

Trump used heavy-handed tactics to drub Harvard, Columbia, and other universities. Many would argue that there is virtue in the crusade against campus antisemitism and DEI activism. Trump is demanding influence over curricula, faculty hiring, and viewpoint auditing. Capitulation is coming in the form of billions in government research grants, blocked visa approval of foreign students, and threatening to revoke the institutions’ tax-exempt status, patents, and accreditation.

• Columbia cried “uncle,” agreeing to pay $220 million (among other concessions).
• Harvard won a first litigation round when an Obama-appointed judge invalidated the funding freeze, but the university knows that victory may be short-lived and that Trump has leverage against which courts are powerless.
• Other institutions watch, and quake.

Coarse, Embarrassing Breeziness 

Democrats took unseemly glee in wielding prosecutorial power against Trump. In her campaign for New York attorney general, Letitia James vowed to dog Trump if elected, and she won in a landslide. Law enforcement could be politicized openly, without apology. Trump has devoured this lesson: Lawfare is craved by the parties’ base supporters, online “influencers,” and the nighttime cable carnivals.

The True Story

The Trump administration is releasing historically important documents about reporters peddling false leaks and fabricated evidence to undermine a president whose opponents didn’t approve.

No Mercy

In her civil-fraud prosecution of Trump, (AG) James tried to take Trump’s children down with him.

Never the forgive-and-forget type, Trump will not let that go. In September, when his appointees at the FBI and DOJ executed search warrants at the home and office of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser and now tireless critic, the president observed that Bolton now knew how he felt when the FBI rifled through Melania Trump’s belongings during the Mar-a-Lago raid.

Bolton had cheered the Biden DOJ’s classified documents probe of Trump. Now Trump is cheering his DOJ’s classified documents probe of Bolton.

Law is King

There are not many who can effectively argue that the terrorism effect is not working. With the border crisis over and aliens self-deporting in droves, a country in which law is king, though, asks not whether government hardball works but whether it is legal.

How Americans Get News

For those who are counting, Donald Trump has a little over 1,200 days left in the White House. The mainstream news companies, even if they are propped up by millionaire donors, will carry on, notes Jenkins.

Declining Importance

Larry Ellison, his son’s key backer and the world’s second richest man, has been a Trump donor and supporter, reports Jenkins.

More to the point, the Ellisons (Dad & Son) wouldn’t be buying Warner for its linear TV news and entertainment brands and properties, which they’d view as disposable. They’re after its studio, big-ticket franchises and HBO, businesses with a future.

“There’s no buttering over their declining importance in how Americans get their news or form their attitudes,” continues Jenkins.

Mr. Trump hasn’t got powers of intimidation other presidents didn’t have. He just meets less resistance.

Why have CBS-Paramount and ABC-Disney bent over for complaints of no legal or moral authority? Because their network news and late-night TV businesses are of so little value to these companies and their shareholders.

Meanwhile, WSJ editors bestow kudos on Ted Cruz for noticing the danger from Brendan Carr’s use of regulatory threats to stifle free speech.

(Senator) Cruz has in recent years emerged as a rare Member of Congress willing to defend free-market economic policies in his post as Chairman of the Commerce Committee.

Republicans face a conundrum, notes the WSJ: Do Republicans rubber-stamp this misuse of regulatory and prosecutorial power?

If they do, they won’t have grounds to complain when the same screws are turned on them by the next Democratic president.