While the Biden administration continues to try to pirouette out of its latest debacle – a ham-handed effort to control “disinformation” — Republican senators, including Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott of Florida, want to nail this coffin shut before the opportunity slips away.
Sen. Tom Cotton on Tuesday led a platoon of nearly 20 GOP lawmakers who seek to block funding for the Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security. This new agency came to light earlier this week.
The Arkansas Republican’s bill is essentially one sentence: “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no Federal funds may be used to establish or support the activities of a Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security, or any other similar entity established in the Department of Homeland Security.”
“The Biden administration wants a government agency dedicated to cracking down on what its subjects can say, an idea popular with Orwellian governments everywhere,” Cotton said in a statement.
“This board is unconstitutional and un-American — my bill puts a stop to it.”
In his own statement, Rubio noted, “The Biden Administration’s new ‘Ministry of Truth’ is dangerously authoritarian. Labeling speech as ‘disinformation’ is the first step for federal censorship and the end of the First Amendment. It has to be defunded.”
In a statement, Scott added, “Joe Biden is using DHS to create thought police, and it should scare the living daylights out of every American. The president claims to care about fighting disinformation, but he and his administration have repeatedly lied to the American people and even called on social media companies to censor and silence American voices.”
“We need to be very clear: this isn’t about a commitment to the truth or keeping families safe. This is Joe Biden and the Democrats using the federal government to police speech. Biden’s thought police is something straight out of Orwell’s 1984 and I will do everything in my power to destroy this attack on free speech. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this important bill.”
Speaking of colleagues, besides Rubio and Scott, the other GOP senators who joined Cotton include: John Boozman of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas, Jim Risch of Idaho, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Mike Crapo of Idaho, Mike Lee of Utah, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Mike Braun of Indiana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Todd Young of Indiana, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Kevin Cramer of North Dakota.
President Joe Biden has named a radical leftist, Nina Jankowicz, to lead the board. Jankowicz, as critics have noted, has been more of a spreader than a stopper of disinformation, having declared the discredited, phony Steele dossier legit and denounced the Hunter Biden laptop story as a product of former President Donald Trump’s campaign.
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