Column Scraping bottom Kevin McCarthy manages to sink even lower

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Crazytown) has a history of spewing anti-vaccine, anti-mask, anti-science claptrap. This week her wacky effusions led to permanent suspension of her personal Twitter account. Facebook — corporate motto: Putting profits first — also saw fit to briefly banish the Georgia congresswoman, an exile that lasted all of 24 hours. By Tuesday, Greene was once more free to offer constituent services and promulgate perfectly reasonable theories like the one about California’s 2018 wildfires being started by Jewish-controlled space lasers. In the year since taking office, Greene has proved to be nothing more than a political distraction, and an odious one at that. But the way GOP House leader Kevin McCarthy responded to her sanctioning by social media — and the fact he chose to weigh in — was telling.“The American experiment is dependent on the freedom and ability of Americans to express themselves, which Republicans are fighting to preserve, ” the Republican from Bakersfield said in a statement. The American experiment is also dependent on recognizing the will of voters as expressed in free and fairly conducted elections, which is something McCarthy and 146 of his Republicans colleagues refused to do on Jan. 6. 2021. But that’s another column. McCarthy further threatened to exact revenge. If Republicans take control of Congress in November’s midterm election, he said, they would respond by “shutting down the business model you rely on today. ”“Twitter (all big tech), if you shut down constitutionally protected speech (not lewd and obscene) you should lose 230 protection, ” McCarthy tweeted, referring to the provision in the 1996 federal Communications Decency Act that allows companies to publish user-posted materials without being held liable. Earlier, McCarthy had warned telecommunications and social media companies against cooperating with congressional investigators probing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, saying Republicans “will not forget” their actions. (Nice little money-minting industry you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it. )There are many good reasons for a long-overdue clampdown on monopolistic disinformation superspreaders like Facebook and other social media. But thwarting an investigation into the attempted violent overthrow of the government and restoring Greene’s personal Twitter account are not two of them. It’s not as though Greene has been silenced. Her official congressional account remains fully functional, serving as a reliable source of misplaced pity and compassion for the jailed insurrectionists who tried to overturn the 2020 election. Moreover, there is no constitutional right to be on Twitter or Facebook, any more than there is a constitutional right to walk into a store and take whatever you like without paying.“Twitter simply kicking someone off is not a 1st Amendment violation, ” said Eugene Volokh, a UCLA expert on constitutional law. All data is taken from the source: http://latimes.com Article Link: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2022-01-07/kevin-mccarthy-marjorie-taylor-greene-twitter-trump #mccarthy #newslive #newstodayheadlines #newstodayfox #newsworld #newsworldabc #

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