WASHINGTON ― With congressional talks close to finalizing this year’s defense policy bill, lawmakers are wrestling with the Trump administration’s last-minute demand to include language to overhaul the tech industry’s prized liability shield.
Closed-door talks between the House, Senate and White House had centered President Donald Trump’s threat to veto the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act over military base renaming issues, but the focus has shifted in recent days to a topic disconnected from national security, according to multiple congressional sources: Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
The section’s protections have served as a bedrock for unfettered speech on the internet, but Trump and other politicians, including Democrats (though for different reasons than Republicans) argue that Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms have abused that protection and should lose their immunity from lawsuits.
In an escalation of his war with Twitter and other social media companies, Trump signed an executive order in May challenging those protections. He argued that Twitter’s application of fact checks to two of his tweets showed the need to enact checks on tech giants.
In a series of Thanksgiving Day tweets, Trump accusing Twitter of trying to “SILENCE THE TRUTH” by “making up” content that then goes viral.
“Twitter is sending out totally false ‘Trends’ that have absolutely nothing to do with what is really trending in the world. They make it up, and only negative ‘stuff,’” he tweeted, adding: “For purposes of National Security, Section 230 must be immediately terminated!!!”
Shredding 230 would be an eleventh hour win for Trump and Republicans just ahead of a Senate runoff elections in Georgia that will determine control of the chamber during the first two years of President-elect Joe Biden’s tenure. But Democrats may not want to make a deal ― not only because they object to the policy but because Trump vetoing the defense policy bill, which has passed Congress on a bipartisan basis for 59 years in a row, could be a self-own for the GOP.
The fight over Section 230 complicates predictions that lawmakers were days from finishing the $740.5 billion authorization bill, which cements decisions about troop levels, new weapons systems and military personnel policy. Axios was first to report that Senate Republicans were trying to improvise a proposal to change Section 230 short of a wholesale repeal.
House defense bill strips Confederate base names, curbs president’s powers in troop deployments
House lawmakers on Tuesday passed their $740.5 billion plan for the annual defense authorization bill, including provisions for a hefty military pay raise next year, new restrictions on the president’s war powers and requirements that the Defense Department rename bases honoring Confederate leaders.
The issue was injected into NDAA talks, according to a senior Senate staffer, after Senate Armed Services Committee Republicans had reached out to Commerce Committee Republicans in search of a trade for Trump to drop his veto threat over base renaming. Democrats have insisted renaming stay in the bill while congressional Republicans have called for compromise, arguing that the incoming Biden administration can do the renaming without a legal change.
Though White House chief of staff Mark Meadows reportedly offered last month that Trump could drop those objections if Democrats would agree to repeal Section 230, discussions Tuesday were said to center on White House-drafted language that falls short of a full repeal.
The matter, as of Tuesday, was in the hands of congressional leaders. To include the language means navigating objections from House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., as well as any Republicans or Democrats that might object to the White House language or obstruct the NDAA because of it.
The White House proposal bears some similarities with a Republican bill from Sen. Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, but Wicker’s panel has never reached agreement on the issue. Senate Commerce Committee members on the left and right have offered at least six competing proposals to reform Section 230.
“Let’s use our wildest imaginations and say the White House language gets accepted by Democrats and they’re not going to object and bring the bill down,” said the senior Senate staffer. “At the end of the day, there’s other individual members of the Senate who could very much gum up the works, and from both [political] extremes.”
Lawmakers are worried the bill may not be passed before the new Congress in January, and Smith told Politico this week that punting to the new Congress isn’t feasible for a number of political and procedural reasons. “It’s a brand new Congress. The bill disappears and we’d have to go back through the process,” Smith reportedly said.
Last year, over the objections of some Republicans, Democrats and the White House agreed on language establishing paid parental leave for federal workers ― inserted by Democratic leaders through a self-executing rule in the House and not a vote. Smith and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said after afterward that they hoped to avoid provisions unrelated to defense, if they’re a hindrance during negotiations.
With reporting by The Associated Press.
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