On the JAWBONE Act and the government's quiet grip on speech

I ran a print shop before I ran a post office. I know what it costs a printer to refuse powerful men — and what it costs the public when the printer yields. The principle the JAWBONE Act reaches for, as Reason describes it, is an old one dressed in modern clothes: a government that can bully a private speaker into silence has achieved censorship at a discount, without the embarrassment of a law on the books.

The mechanism is familiar to anyone who has watched a magistrate work. You do not always need a decree. A word from an official — we have noticed your conduct — can accomplish what a statute cannot. The founders understood this, which is why the First Amendment restrains government action, not merely government legislation. Coercion dressed as conversation is still coercion.

What the bill apparently proposes — and I am working from the Reason lead, marking the rest as inference — is transparency and liability. Agencies must report such communications; citizens may sue when bullying crosses the line. These are precisely the right tools. Sunlight and the prospect of damages are, in my experience, the two best disinfectants government misconduct has ever faced. I used them in the post office; I recommend them now.

I will note the bipartisan character of this effort with some pleasure. The free movement of information is not a partisan interest. A postal road that favors one faction's letters over another's is not a postal road; it is a propaganda channel. Any administration, of any party, is tempted to manage the news. The cure must be structural, not dependent on the virtue of whoever holds office this season — virtue in officeholders being, as I once observed, a commodity in shorter supply than one might wish.

The working tradesman and the small farmer have a stake in this that is easy to overlook. They do not lobby; they do not retain counsel. Their information about markets, about government programs, about their own legal rights, reaches them through the same platforms the powerful would like to prune. When the pruning is secret, the small person has no recourse. Disclosure requirements and the right to sue restore a measure of symmetry.

Useful counsel: If this bill advances, write your representative — by whatever modern post you prefer — and ask one simple question: does she support requiring agencies to disclose, in writing, every communication in which a federal official asked a platform to restrict speech? A yes or a no is a public record. Public records are where accountability begins.