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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is seen after a swearing in ceremony for U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper on July 23, 2019 in Washington, D.C.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has been lying in public for a long time. His attempt to blame his wife for flying an upside down American flag, a symbol of MAGA defiance, at his Virginia home shortly after the January 6 insurrection is only the latest in a series of high-profile prevarications dating back to his 2006 Senate confirmation hearing.
Nominated to the Supreme Court by George W. Bush to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor, Alito’s confirmation was all but guaranteed as Republicans held a 55-seat majority in the upper chamber. Yet despite taking an oath to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” on day one of the four-day proceeding, Alito sought to portray himself as a judicial moderate, misrepresenting his positions on a host of critical issues.
First and foremost, Alito lied about his views on abortion and Roe v. Wade (1973), which he called an “an important precedent of the Supreme Court” that had “been on the books for a long time” and had been “reaffirmed” by the court, strengthening its value as settled law. Sixteen years later, with the court firmly in the hands of a hard-right majority, he showed his true colors, authoring the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion that overturned Roe, proclaiming that Roe “was egregiously wrong from the start,” and that its reasoning was “exceptionally weak” and caused “dangerous consequences” for the country.
Short of expanding the court, which is a long-term political project, there is at least one thing supporters of impartial justice can do. We can, and must, expose Alito’s mendacity and corruption at every opportunity.
Alito similarly shaded the truth at his confirmation hearing about his support for a broad-based interpretation of presidential immunity and the “unitary executive” theory that advocates for an all-powerful presidency—questions that loom large before the Supreme Court in the election-subversion case brought by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith against Donald Trump that the court will decide by the end of its current term. Alito was also suspiciously evasive about his membership in a now-defunct Princeton University alumni group that opposed the admission of women and tried to limit the enrollment of minority students.
None of Alito’s confirmation-hearing posturing was convincing or surprising. Long before the hearing, Alito had earned a well-deserved reputation as an aggressively hardcore Republican partisan, serving as a deputy assistant attorney general assigned to the Office of Legal Counsel from 1985-87 during Ronald Reagan’s second term as president; working as the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey from 1987 to 1990; and sitting as a federal appellate judge on D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals from 1990 to 2006.
As a federal judge, he was given the nickname “Strip-Search Sammy” for a dissenting opinion he penned in 2004 in a drug-raid appeal from Pennsylvania, in which he approved of the strip search of a 10-year-old girl who was not a suspect in the case. Although he claimed at his confirmation hearing that he “wasn’t happy” about what had happened to the child, he insisted his dissent was based solely on a technical application of the Fourth Amendment.
On the Supreme Court, Alito has operated very much in keeping with his strip-search moniker, ruling in favor of defendants in only 20% of the criminal cases that have come before him. The court’s next most pro-prosecution justice, Clarence Thomas, has voted in favor of defendants at a 25% rate.
Like Thomas, Alito has also come under fire for alleged ethics violations while on the Supreme Court. As reported by ProPublica last year, he took a luxury fishing trip to Alaska in 2008, flying for free aboard a private jet owned by Republican megadonor Paul Singer and staying, all-expenses paid, at an opulent rustic lodge owned by the businessman. Alito not only failed to disclose the trip on his annual financial disclosure forms, but he also failed to recuse himself from participating in a case involving Singer’s hedge fund that the court decided in the fund’s favor in 2014.
Throwing his wife under the bus in the flag controversy represents a more cowardly ethical low. Martha Ann Alito, a former law librarian, sat dutifully behind her husband throughout his confirmation hearing. At one point, as her spouse came under increasingly harsh questioning by Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she burst into tears and briefly left the room. The incident, according to investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, changed the entire tenor of the hearing. “It was game, set, match,” Steve Schmidt, the veteran Republican operative turned never-Trumper who worked on Alito’s confirmation, told Isikoff, for an article posted last week by The Wrap.
When The New York Times published the photo of the upside-down American flag that had been raised outside his Virginia home in the days following the January 6 insurrection, Justice Alito had a choice. He could have manned up and admitted that he knew full well that the inverted flag, a traditional signal of naval distress, had been appropriated as a symbol of the “stop-the-steal” movement and had been carried by rioters who stormed the Capitol. Or he could have opted to pin responsibility solely on his wife. In an email to the Times, he chose the latter, writing:
I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag. It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.
As it turns out, the upside-down flag isn’t the only stop-the-steal banner Alito and his wife have brandished since the insurrection. Last summer, according to another New York Times report, the couple flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at their New Jersey vacation home. Depicting a green pine tree topped by the motto “Appeal to Heaven,” the flag dates to the Revolutionary War, but has been repurposed by Christian nationalists and like the inverted Stars-and-Stripes, was seen in the hands of insurrectionists on January 6.
Alito has offered no further comment on the flag scandals, and it’s easy to understand why. He doesn’t have to. The framers of the Constitution endowed Supreme Court justices with lifetime appointments, and barring impeachment, they are beyond legal accountability.
Short of expanding the court, which is a long-term political project, there is at least one thing supporters of impartial justice can do. We can, and must, expose Alito’s mendacity and corruption at every opportunity. As Isikoff noted for The Wrap, Alito has replaced Thomas as the most polarizing justice on the Supreme Court. “Nobody likes him,” Schmidt told Isikoff. “He’s sullen, aggrieved, prickly, and angry.” It’s imperative to let Alito know that we are angry, too.
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Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has been lying in public for a long time. His attempt to blame his wife for flying an upside down American flag, a symbol of MAGA defiance, at his Virginia home shortly after the January 6 insurrection is only the latest in a series of high-profile prevarications dating back to his 2006 Senate confirmation hearing.
Nominated to the Supreme Court by George W. Bush to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor, Alito’s confirmation was all but guaranteed as Republicans held a 55-seat majority in the upper chamber. Yet despite taking an oath to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” on day one of the four-day proceeding, Alito sought to portray himself as a judicial moderate, misrepresenting his positions on a host of critical issues.
First and foremost, Alito lied about his views on abortion and Roe v. Wade (1973), which he called an “an important precedent of the Supreme Court” that had “been on the books for a long time” and had been “reaffirmed” by the court, strengthening its value as settled law. Sixteen years later, with the court firmly in the hands of a hard-right majority, he showed his true colors, authoring the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion that overturned Roe, proclaiming that Roe “was egregiously wrong from the start,” and that its reasoning was “exceptionally weak” and caused “dangerous consequences” for the country.
Short of expanding the court, which is a long-term political project, there is at least one thing supporters of impartial justice can do. We can, and must, expose Alito’s mendacity and corruption at every opportunity.
Alito similarly shaded the truth at his confirmation hearing about his support for a broad-based interpretation of presidential immunity and the “unitary executive” theory that advocates for an all-powerful presidency—questions that loom large before the Supreme Court in the election-subversion case brought by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith against Donald Trump that the court will decide by the end of its current term. Alito was also suspiciously evasive about his membership in a now-defunct Princeton University alumni group that opposed the admission of women and tried to limit the enrollment of minority students.
None of Alito’s confirmation-hearing posturing was convincing or surprising. Long before the hearing, Alito had earned a well-deserved reputation as an aggressively hardcore Republican partisan, serving as a deputy assistant attorney general assigned to the Office of Legal Counsel from 1985-87 during Ronald Reagan’s second term as president; working as the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey from 1987 to 1990; and sitting as a federal appellate judge on D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals from 1990 to 2006.
As a federal judge, he was given the nickname “Strip-Search Sammy” for a dissenting opinion he penned in 2004 in a drug-raid appeal from Pennsylvania, in which he approved of the strip search of a 10-year-old girl who was not a suspect in the case. Although he claimed at his confirmation hearing that he “wasn’t happy” about what had happened to the child, he insisted his dissent was based solely on a technical application of the Fourth Amendment.
On the Supreme Court, Alito has operated very much in keeping with his strip-search moniker, ruling in favor of defendants in only 20% of the criminal cases that have come before him. The court’s next most pro-prosecution justice, Clarence Thomas, has voted in favor of defendants at a 25% rate.
Like Thomas, Alito has also come under fire for alleged ethics violations while on the Supreme Court. As reported by ProPublica last year, he took a luxury fishing trip to Alaska in 2008, flying for free aboard a private jet owned by Republican megadonor Paul Singer and staying, all-expenses paid, at an opulent rustic lodge owned by the businessman. Alito not only failed to disclose the trip on his annual financial disclosure forms, but he also failed to recuse himself from participating in a case involving Singer’s hedge fund that the court decided in the fund’s favor in 2014.
Throwing his wife under the bus in the flag controversy represents a more cowardly ethical low. Martha Ann Alito, a former law librarian, sat dutifully behind her husband throughout his confirmation hearing. At one point, as her spouse came under increasingly harsh questioning by Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she burst into tears and briefly left the room. The incident, according to investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, changed the entire tenor of the hearing. “It was game, set, match,” Steve Schmidt, the veteran Republican operative turned never-Trumper who worked on Alito’s confirmation, told Isikoff, for an article posted last week by The Wrap.
When The New York Times published the photo of the upside-down American flag that had been raised outside his Virginia home in the days following the January 6 insurrection, Justice Alito had a choice. He could have manned up and admitted that he knew full well that the inverted flag, a traditional signal of naval distress, had been appropriated as a symbol of the “stop-the-steal” movement and had been carried by rioters who stormed the Capitol. Or he could have opted to pin responsibility solely on his wife. In an email to the Times, he chose the latter, writing:
I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag. It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.
As it turns out, the upside-down flag isn’t the only stop-the-steal banner Alito and his wife have brandished since the insurrection. Last summer, according to another New York Times report, the couple flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at their New Jersey vacation home. Depicting a green pine tree topped by the motto “Appeal to Heaven,” the flag dates to the Revolutionary War, but has been repurposed by Christian nationalists and like the inverted Stars-and-Stripes, was seen in the hands of insurrectionists on January 6.
Alito has offered no further comment on the flag scandals, and it’s easy to understand why. He doesn’t have to. The framers of the Constitution endowed Supreme Court justices with lifetime appointments, and barring impeachment, they are beyond legal accountability.
Short of expanding the court, which is a long-term political project, there is at least one thing supporters of impartial justice can do. We can, and must, expose Alito’s mendacity and corruption at every opportunity. As Isikoff noted for The Wrap, Alito has replaced Thomas as the most polarizing justice on the Supreme Court. “Nobody likes him,” Schmidt told Isikoff. “He’s sullen, aggrieved, prickly, and angry.” It’s imperative to let Alito know that we are angry, too.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has been lying in public for a long time. His attempt to blame his wife for flying an upside down American flag, a symbol of MAGA defiance, at his Virginia home shortly after the January 6 insurrection is only the latest in a series of high-profile prevarications dating back to his 2006 Senate confirmation hearing.
Nominated to the Supreme Court by George W. Bush to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor, Alito’s confirmation was all but guaranteed as Republicans held a 55-seat majority in the upper chamber. Yet despite taking an oath to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” on day one of the four-day proceeding, Alito sought to portray himself as a judicial moderate, misrepresenting his positions on a host of critical issues.
First and foremost, Alito lied about his views on abortion and Roe v. Wade (1973), which he called an “an important precedent of the Supreme Court” that had “been on the books for a long time” and had been “reaffirmed” by the court, strengthening its value as settled law. Sixteen years later, with the court firmly in the hands of a hard-right majority, he showed his true colors, authoring the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization opinion that overturned Roe, proclaiming that Roe “was egregiously wrong from the start,” and that its reasoning was “exceptionally weak” and caused “dangerous consequences” for the country.
Short of expanding the court, which is a long-term political project, there is at least one thing supporters of impartial justice can do. We can, and must, expose Alito’s mendacity and corruption at every opportunity.
Alito similarly shaded the truth at his confirmation hearing about his support for a broad-based interpretation of presidential immunity and the “unitary executive” theory that advocates for an all-powerful presidency—questions that loom large before the Supreme Court in the election-subversion case brought by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith against Donald Trump that the court will decide by the end of its current term. Alito was also suspiciously evasive about his membership in a now-defunct Princeton University alumni group that opposed the admission of women and tried to limit the enrollment of minority students.
None of Alito’s confirmation-hearing posturing was convincing or surprising. Long before the hearing, Alito had earned a well-deserved reputation as an aggressively hardcore Republican partisan, serving as a deputy assistant attorney general assigned to the Office of Legal Counsel from 1985-87 during Ronald Reagan’s second term as president; working as the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey from 1987 to 1990; and sitting as a federal appellate judge on D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals from 1990 to 2006.
As a federal judge, he was given the nickname “Strip-Search Sammy” for a dissenting opinion he penned in 2004 in a drug-raid appeal from Pennsylvania, in which he approved of the strip search of a 10-year-old girl who was not a suspect in the case. Although he claimed at his confirmation hearing that he “wasn’t happy” about what had happened to the child, he insisted his dissent was based solely on a technical application of the Fourth Amendment.
On the Supreme Court, Alito has operated very much in keeping with his strip-search moniker, ruling in favor of defendants in only 20% of the criminal cases that have come before him. The court’s next most pro-prosecution justice, Clarence Thomas, has voted in favor of defendants at a 25% rate.
Like Thomas, Alito has also come under fire for alleged ethics violations while on the Supreme Court. As reported by ProPublica last year, he took a luxury fishing trip to Alaska in 2008, flying for free aboard a private jet owned by Republican megadonor Paul Singer and staying, all-expenses paid, at an opulent rustic lodge owned by the businessman. Alito not only failed to disclose the trip on his annual financial disclosure forms, but he also failed to recuse himself from participating in a case involving Singer’s hedge fund that the court decided in the fund’s favor in 2014.
Throwing his wife under the bus in the flag controversy represents a more cowardly ethical low. Martha Ann Alito, a former law librarian, sat dutifully behind her husband throughout his confirmation hearing. At one point, as her spouse came under increasingly harsh questioning by Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she burst into tears and briefly left the room. The incident, according to investigative reporter Michael Isikoff, changed the entire tenor of the hearing. “It was game, set, match,” Steve Schmidt, the veteran Republican operative turned never-Trumper who worked on Alito’s confirmation, told Isikoff, for an article posted last week by The Wrap.
When The New York Times published the photo of the upside-down American flag that had been raised outside his Virginia home in the days following the January 6 insurrection, Justice Alito had a choice. He could have manned up and admitted that he knew full well that the inverted flag, a traditional signal of naval distress, had been appropriated as a symbol of the “stop-the-steal” movement and had been carried by rioters who stormed the Capitol. Or he could have opted to pin responsibility solely on his wife. In an email to the Times, he chose the latter, writing:
I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag. It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.
As it turns out, the upside-down flag isn’t the only stop-the-steal banner Alito and his wife have brandished since the insurrection. Last summer, according to another New York Times report, the couple flew an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at their New Jersey vacation home. Depicting a green pine tree topped by the motto “Appeal to Heaven,” the flag dates to the Revolutionary War, but has been repurposed by Christian nationalists and like the inverted Stars-and-Stripes, was seen in the hands of insurrectionists on January 6.
Alito has offered no further comment on the flag scandals, and it’s easy to understand why. He doesn’t have to. The framers of the Constitution endowed Supreme Court justices with lifetime appointments, and barring impeachment, they are beyond legal accountability.
Short of expanding the court, which is a long-term political project, there is at least one thing supporters of impartial justice can do. We can, and must, expose Alito’s mendacity and corruption at every opportunity. As Isikoff noted for The Wrap, Alito has replaced Thomas as the most polarizing justice on the Supreme Court. “Nobody likes him,” Schmidt told Isikoff. “He’s sullen, aggrieved, prickly, and angry.” It’s imperative to let Alito know that we are angry, too.
Against a backdrop of Israel's genocidal obliteration of Gaza City and a worsening man-made famine throughout the embattled Palestinian exclave, the United States on Thursday cast its sixth United Nations Security Council veto of a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and the release of all hostages held by Hamas.
At its 10,000th meeting, the UN Security Council voted 14-1 with no abstentions in favor of a resolution proposed by the 10 nonpermanent UNSC members demanding "an immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire" in Gaza, the "release of all hostages" held by Hamas, and for Israel to "immediately and unconditionally lift all restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid" into the besieged strip.
Morgan Ortagus, President Donald Trump's deputy special envoy to the Middle East, vetoed the proposal, saying that the move "will come as no surprise," as the US has killed five previous UNSC Gaza ceasefire resolutions under both the Biden and Trump administrations, most recently in June.
Ortagus said the resolution failed to condemn Hamas or affirm Israel's right to self-defense and “wrongly legitimizes the false narratives benefiting Hamas, which have sadly found currency in this council."
The US has unconditionally provided Israel with billions of dollars worth of armed aid and diplomatic cover since October 2023 as the key Mideast ally wages a war increasingly viewed as genocidal, including by a commission of independent UN experts this week.
Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour said the torpedoed resolution represented the "bare minimum" that must be accomplished, adding that “it is deeply regrettable and painful that it has been blocked.”
“Babies dying of starvation, snipers shooting people in the head, civilians killed en masse, families displaced again and again... humanitarians and journalists targeted... while Israeli officials are openly mocking all of this," Mansour added.
Following the UNSC's latest failure to pass a ceasefire resolution, Algerian Ambassador to the UN Amar Bendjama asked Gazans to "forgive" the body for not only its inability to approve such measures, but also for failing to stop the Gaza famine, in which at least hundreds of Palestinians have died and hundreds of thousands more are starving. Every UNSC members but the US concurred last month that the Gaza famine is a man-made catastrophe.
“Israel kills every day and nothing happens," Bendjama said. "Israel starves a people and nothing happens. Israel bombs hospitals, schools, shelters, and nothing happens. Israel attacks a mediator and steps on diplomacy, and nothing happens. And with every act, every act unpunished, humanity itself is diminished.”
Benjama also asked Gazans to "forgive us" for failing to protect children in the strip, more than 20,000 of whom have been killed by Israeli bombs, bullets, and blockade over the past 713 days. He also noted that upward of 12,000 women, 4,000 elderly, 1,400 doctors and nurses, 500 aid workers, and 250 journalists “have been killed by Israel."
Condemning Thursday's veto, Hamas accused the US of “blatant complicity in the crime of genocide," which Israel is accused of committing in an ongoing International Court of Justice (ICJ) case filed in December 2023 by South Africa and backed by around two dozen nations.
Hamas—which led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and is believed to be holding 20 hostages left alive out of 251 people kidnapped that day—implored the countries that sponsored the ceasefire resolution to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who along with former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, to accept an agreement to halt hostilities.
Overall, at least 65,141 Palestinians have been killed and over 165,900 others wounded by Israeli forces since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose figures have not only been confirmed by former IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, but deemed a significant undercount by independent researchers. Thousands more Gazans are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the ruins of the flattened strip.
UK Ambassador to the UN Barbara Woodward stessed after Thursday's failed UNSC resolution that "we need a ceasefire more than ever."
“Israel’s reckless expansion of its military operation takes us further away from a deal which could bring the hostages home and end the suffering in Gaza," Woodward said.
Thursday's developments came as Israeli forces continued to lay waste to Gaza City as they push deeper into the city as part of Operation Gideon's Chariots 2, a campaign to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse around 1 million Palestinians from the strip's capital. Israeli leaders have said they are carrying out the operation in accordance with Trump's proposal to empty Gaza of Palestinians and transform it into the "Riviera of the Middle East."
In what some observers said was a bid to prevent the world from witnessing fresh Israeli war crimes in Gaza City, internet and phone lines were cut off in the strip Thursday, although officials said service has since been mostly restored.
Gaza officials said Thursday that at least 50 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces since dawn, including 40 in Gaza City, which Al Jazeera reporter Tareq Abu Azzoum said is being pummeled into "a lifeless wasteland."
Azzoum reported that tens of thousands of Palestinians "are moving to the south on foot or in carts, looking for any place that is relatively safe—but with no guarantee of safety—or at least for shelter."
Israel has repeatedly bombed areas it advised Palestinians were "safe zones," including a September 2 airstrike that massacred 11 people—nine of them children—queued up to collect water in al-Mawasi.
"Most families who have arrived in the south have not found space," Azzoum added. "That’s why we’ve seen people setting up makeshift tents close to the water while others are left stranded in the street, living under the open sky."
President Donald Trump doubled down on his threats to silence his critics Thursday, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that outlets that give him "bad press" may have their broadcast licenses taken away.
The threat came just one day after his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) director, Brendan Carr, successfully pressured ABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel's show from the air by threatening the broadcast licenses of its affiliates over a comment the comedian made about the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
"I read someplace that the networks were 97% against me," Trump told the press gaggle. "I get 97% negative, and yet I won it easily. I won all seven swing states, popular vote, I won everything. And they're 97% against, they give me wholly bad publicity... I mean, they're getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away."
"When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do," the president continued. "If you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative on in years or something, somebody said, but when you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”
He said that the decision would be left up to Carr, who has threatened to take away licenses from networks that air what he called "distorted" content.
It is unclear where Trump's statistic that networks have been "97% against" him originates, nor the claim that mainstream news networks "haven't had a conservative on in years."
But even if it were true, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says "the FCC doesn't have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to revoke a license because of content."
In comments made to Axios Thursday, Gomez—the lone Democrat on the five-member panel—said that the Trump administration was "weaponizing its licensing authority in order to bring broadcasters to heel," as part of a "campaign of censorship and control."
National news networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC do not have broadcasting licenses approved by the FCC, nor do cable networks like CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. The licenses threatened by Carr are for local affiliates, which—despite having the branding of the big networks—are owned by less well-known companies like Nexstar Media Group and the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, both of which pushed in favor of ABC's decision to ax Kimmel.
Gomez said that with Trump's intimidation of broadcasters, the "threat is the point."
"It is a very hard standard to meet to revoke a license, which is why it's so rarely done, but broadcast license to the broadcasters are extremely valuable," she said. "And so they don't want to be dragged before the FCC either in order to answer to an enforcement complaint of some kind or under the threat of possible revocation."
Democratic lawmakers are vowing to investigate the Trump administration's pressure campaign that may have led to ABC deciding to indefinitely suspend late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) announced on Thursday that he filed a motion to subpoena Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr one day after he publicly warned ABC of negative consequences if the network kept Kimmel on the air.
"Enough of Congress sleepwalking while [President Donald] Trump and [Vice President JD] Vance shred the First Amendment and Constitution," Khanna declared. "It is time for Congress to stand up for Article I."
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, also said on Thursday that he was opening an investigation into the potential financial aspects of Carr's pressure campaign on ABC, including the involvement of Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is the network's largest affiliate and is currently involved in merger talks that will need FCC approval.
"The Oversight Committee is launching an investigation into ABC, Sinclair, and the FCC," he said. "We will not be intimidated and we will defend the First Amendment."
Progressive politicians weren't the only ones launching an investigation into the Kimmel controversy, as legal organization Democracy Forward announced that it's filed a a Freedom of Information Act request for records after January 20, 2025 related to any FCC efforts “to use the agency’s licensing and enforcement powers to police and limit speech and influence what the public can watch and hear.”