What if the two major crises of the moment turn out to have a single, combined solution?
The first crisis is the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after FCC Chair Brendan Carr made a direct threat against ABC, telling its local TV affiliates, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way”—the hard way being that he revokes their right to broadcast. This is a clear and blatant act of state censorship against a critic of the Trump administration.
The second crisis is a looming government shutdown. Congress has to pass a resolution to authorize government spending beyond the end of September. That requires 60 votes in the Senate, which means that it needs votes from Democrats. This is literally the only leverage Democrats in Congress have right now, and there has been vigorous debate over whether they should use it and what they should use it for.
I think you can already guess where I’m going with this.
The state censorship of Jimmy Kimmel gives Democrats a perfect issue to rally around and to demonstrate they can use their power and get results.
Brendan Carr used his power to cancel Jimmy Kimmel. The Democrats should use their power to cancel Brendan Carr.
But first, this article is just a small part of a bigger story: Donald Trump’s accelerating attempt to impose dictatorship in the United States. Get the whole story in my book.
Fighting on the 10-Yard Line
Democrats should refuse their consent to an extension of government funding and shut down the government until Brendan Carr resigns. And they should hold out until Carr is replaced by a new FCC chair who is not just another Trump flunky but someone with a reputation for sufficient independence to refuse to censor the airwaves on behalf of a vengeful president.
It’s a lot to ask for—but it’s also something simple to ask for, a single big issue that is of obvious central importance to the future of freedom in America.
This kind of showdown would accomplish two things: It would focus the American people’s attention on a vital issue, and it would actually do something substantive to stop the threat of censorship.
This is certainly better than the Democratic leadership’s current strategy, which is to focus on anything and everything except Trump’s threats to free speech and democracy. Democrats are acting on the assumption that the American people don’t know or care about preserving their own system of government and care only about narrowly economic “kitchen table” issues. Instead of standing up against any of Trump’s abuses of executive power, they are demanding the restoration of health care subsidies that were cut in a recent Republican-backed budget bill.
This isn’t a rational calculation; it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the public is not acting like they care about threats to liberal democracy, this is partly because Democrats act as if they don’t care about these threats. The American people are less likely even to know that their entire system of government is under attack if the opposition party never bothers to take a stand in its defense.
But this calculation is also foolish, because the public does know, and if they didn’t know before now, the censorship of Jimmy Kimmell immediately made it a central topic of the national conversation. This is a case that spills over into popular culture, and it has caught the attention of many people who do not follow politics obsessively.
It is also an issue that is clearly understandable. Trump has literally been holding press conferences to declare that TV shows that criticize him do not count a free speech, whining that “when 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech.” This censorship is not subtle and indirect. It is blatant, self-declared, and out in the open.
This doesn’t just go against America’s most basic laws and traditions. It goes against overwhelming public opinion. Polls on the issue generally yield exactly what you would expect: roughly 90% support for freedom of speech and opposition to government censorship. What better issue on which to fight than one where you can catch Trump on the wrong side of a 90/10 issue? It used to be said that most of politics is fought between the 40-yard lines. This is politics that starts on the other side’s 10-yard line, with the endzone right there ahead of us.
It’s also an issue on which we can expect a parade of charismatic celebrities to step forward and back Democrats’ demands. Heck, even some members of Trump’s own party don’t have his back on this because they realize he is setting precedents that could one day be used against them.
Democrats have been reluctant to shut down the government because they know that people will feel the pain and inconvenience and might not think the cause behind it is worth the trouble. But freedom of speech is an essential American value that is clearly worth fighting for.
It Is the Duty of the Opposition to Oppose
Ending government censorship is also an issue for which a government shutdown is specifically an appropriate response.
Democrats balked at shutting down the government earlier this year, during the height of the DOGE cuts, because they thought that’s what Trump wanted: to eliminate programs and reduce spending. So why give it to him by shutting down a government he was already dismantling? Maybe there was some plausibility to that, back when Trump was still play-acting at budget cuts. By now we know that he never really cared about cutting government and didn’t actually do it; federal spending for the first half of 2025 was actually $142 billion higher than for the same period in 2024. The difference is that now we are spending money primarily at the discretion of the president rather than Congress.
That tells us all we need to know about what Trump is actually trying to do. He is not an old-fashioned small-government Republican. He does not want to reduce or eliminate government power—he wants to take it over and abuse it for his own goals. And his main goal is to entrench himself in power forever.
This is a fight for authority between Congress and the president. That is the big reason why health care subsidies are the wrong battle to fight. It’s not just that it’s kind of a DC-insider issue that most Americans aren’t aware of, even if it affects them. The problem is that this is a fight that is purely within Congress. Republicans in Congress voted to cut these subsidies, and Democrats in Congress are demanding to restore them. But if we’re going to go so far as to shut down the government, it should involve something bigger, something where the very power of Congress to assert itself against the executive is at stake.
The fight over censorship allows Democrats to use their one big stronghold of political power on the federal level—a substantial minority in Congress—to provide a check against another branch of government. It is a much bigger and more vital thing to do with the power they have.
Given that a government shutdown is the only big tool they possess, I believe they are required to use it. It is the duty of the opposition to oppose.
Moreover, it is very specifically their duty to oppose state censorship. Traditionally, this is what the “liberals” existed for. In the old 20th-Century liberal-versus-conservative dichotomy, one of the most important selling points for the liberals is that they were against censorship. They were for freedom of speech and freedom of thought and a freewheeling cultural openness. It was not entirely the fault of elected Democrats that in the 21st Century, liberals became associated with censorious so-called “cancel culture.” Nancy Pelosi never canceled anyone; this was mostly done by angry and extremely online 19-year-olds. But that is precisely why Democrats in Congress should seize this opportunity to reclaim the moral high ground on freedom of speech and censorship and become the champions of this all-American cause.
It might actually be enough to show voters that Democrats can do something and deserve to be in office.
Save the Country and Save Yourselves
Most of all, Democrats need to draw a line in the sand on state censorship because of what it would substantively accomplish. Preserving freedom of speech preserves the very possibility of a political opposition, and it does so at what might be our very last chance.
Donald Trump is announcing the principle that criticism of him should not be allowed, and he is exercising the kind of power that could impose this control. What would remain of an opposition political party, or any kind of competitive political system, if he is not stopped now? There is no more important issue in our political system and no more urgent purpose for which the Democrats should be using the maximum of the power they possess on behalf of the American people. If they do it, they can save the country, and they will save themselves.
All they need to do is to tell Trump they will shut down the government until he fires Brendan Carr and removes the threat of state censorship—and they can start by warning him, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Sometimes I don't know how you do it. You've got this guy in your comments who thinks it was Obama and/or Biden who threw Trump off Twitter during Trump's term in office. Right after Trump sent a mob to kill his own vice President and anyone else they could find. Yeesh.
This is a brilliant idea. I have already written to my two Democratic senators urging them in my own words to follow this strategy. I hope my letter was up to the task. Oh, and I wrote to about 100 of my acquaintances, asking them to do the same.