Mike O’Rielly’s Free Speech Fall

Michael O’Rielly has done yeoman work as a member of the Federal Communications Commission, but the White House abruptly pulled his renomination for another five-year term. The decision speaks better of Commissioner O’Rielly than of the President. Commissioner O’Rielly was scuttled for remarks about regulating speech. In vogue on the right and left is rewriting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which empowers social-media companies to scrub objectionable content and shields them from liability for what users say on their platforms. O’Rielly said in a June C-SPAN interview that he was talking to experts but had “deep reservations” that Congress intended the FCC to have such authority. This modesty is unusual for a regulator, and conservatives are supposed to respect the limits of the law. In saner times few on the right would dispute these points, but Commissioner O’Rielly will now be out of his job in 2021 when his voice would be valuable at a Biden FCC. This is regrettable because he has been a champion of innovation and deregulation, especially in areas without glamor such as misuse of 911 fees or anachronistic rules on children’s programming. The episode is a warning that the left isn’t the only movement that demands ideological conformity.