How very Meta: House Dems attempt to censor RFK Jr on censorship — and he erupts

How do you deal with a prominent figure in your own party who decries government-imposed censorship? Demanding that his testimony be stopped before it can begin is probably not a great strategy, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr demonstrated why this morning. After 102 House Democrats signed a petition demanding that the House’s Weaponization of Government subcommittee chair Jim Jordan remove RFK Jr from the witness list, RFK responded by accusing them of being part of the problem.

His argument was a mess at times, but it’s certainly great fodder for popcorn passing:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blasted House Democrats who he said were trying “to censor a censorship hearing” Thursday after 102 of them signed a letter asking him to be disinvited from testifying before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

“Many of my fellow Democrats, I’ve spent my life in this party. I’ve devoted my life to the values of this party,” Kennedy, who is challenging President Biden for the 2024 Democratic nomination, told panel members in his opening statement.

“This itself is evidence of the problem that this hearing was convened to address,” he said, holding up the letter against him led by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) and Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.). “This is an attempt to censor a censorship hearing.”

Kennedy goes a bit off the rails at one point. Rather than just rest on the obvious irony of Democrats’ demand to exclude his testimony from a hearing on government censorship, RFK broadens the definition of “censorship” to include criticisms of his statements, including a recent one regarding COVID and Jews. Whether or not one thinks that RFK’s footsie-playing with conspiracy theorists on COVID being engineered to protect Ashkenazi Jews is anti-Semitic, his critics have the same free-speech rights to criticize it that way as RFK had to air those theories (in the some-are-saying dodge he employed while denying he endorsed the idea).

For that matter, though, RFK Jr is a very problematic hero for free speech. In a since-deleted screed at EcoWatch nine years ago, Kennedy called for “Jailing Climate Deniers” — the title of his essay, in fact. Reason’s Ronald Bailey noted at the time that RFK allowed that individuals had a First Amendment right to question the science, but that states should forcibly dismantle corporations and businesses that tried to do the same. Kennedy explicitly called on Attorneys General to deliver “corporate death” to all who dared speak out:

Any state attorney general with the will, resolve and viscera to stand to up to the dangerous and duplicitous corporate propagandists, has authority to annul the charters of each of these mercenary merchants of deceit. An attorney general with particularly potent glands could revoke the charters not just oil industry surrogates like AEI and CEI, he or she could also withdraw state operating authority from the soulless, nationless oil companies that have sponsored “Big Lie” campaigns and force them to sell their in-state assets to more responsible competitors.

Koch Industries and ExxonMobil have particularly distinguished themselves as candidates for corporate death. No other companies have worked harder or spent more money to impede the government from taking action on global warming to safeguard public welfare. Both companies have employed artifice on a massive scale and spent tens of millions of dollars to purchase fraudulent junk science. The greedy, immoral, anti-social pathology behind ExxonMobil and Koch’s mendacious crusade is even starker given the open acknowledgment since 2007 by the other major oil companies including Shell, Chevron and BP, that burning oil is causing climate change.

Kennedy didn’t stop there. He wanted think tanks that offered opposition to climate-change hysterics smashed too:

Among the groups that have received millions from Exxon and Koch Industries are the Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, Cooler Heads Coalition, Global Climate Coalition, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Americans for Prosperity, Heartland Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), George C. Marshall Institute, State Policy Network, Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Needless to say, Robert F. “Corporate Death” Kennedy Jr hardly makes for a sympathetic victim of a censorship regime that Kennedy once advocated for his political opponents. This is why I routinely remind temporarily besotted conservatives that RFK is a completely unreliable and unworthy ally. Nonetheless, Kennedy did get victimized by the processes he once championed, and if House Democrats had their way, RFK would still be getting silenced to this moment.

In their demand, those same House Democrats demonstrated the necessity for a subcommittee on the weaponization of government. Jordan and the House Republicans want to expose and end the  executive branch’s efforts to use “misinformation” claims to covertly silence critics and suppress dissent. His fellow Democrats all but endorsed these outrageously unconstitutional actions by insisting that Congress should silence Kennedy at the hearing for discussing how he himself has been actually censored, proving once again that irony is dead in Washington DC.

That wasn’t the only evidence of irony extinction in hearing this week, either. Yesterday’s IRS whistleblower hearing produced this constitutional-distorting claim from Rep. Kweisi Mfume, in which the DoJ and IRS exist to “keep democracy in check”:

Please go read the Constitution. It’s not the job of the DOJ, FBI, or IRS to “keep democracy in check” or to “provide the checks and the balances.” @RepKweisiMfume said the quiet part out loud. This is how President Biden’s allies view the job of the DOJ. pic.twitter.com/ahF5dlKKNB

— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) July 19, 2023

Power Line’s Scott Johnson calls this a Kinsleyan gaffe — when a politician accidentally tells the truth. This does have that quality in both scandals presently being investigated by the House. Mfume gets this exactly backwards: Democracy is what keeps executive-branch agencies in check, and that check comes through Congress. Mfume’s argument would ignore the clear separation of co-equal powers established by the Constitution as well as the accountability that the executive branch owes to the legislative branch.

Did Mfume merely misspeak? Hardly. This perspective would justify the censorship regime imposed by the executive branch on social media platforms, as well as the “directed justice” that the DoJ created to let Hunter Biden off the hook for felony charges on behavior that would land anyone else in prison for years. That isn’t an argument for democracy, but for its opposite — an authoritarian regime that has no checks or balances on its power, but instead employs “checks” on its opposition while bestowing favor on its supporters.

As wrong as RFK goes in parts in this clip and as fringy as he might be, Kennedy doesn’t get that point wrong. In doing so, RFK exposes his fellow Democrats as the real threat to democracy and the constitutional order that they are.