Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran questions Kimmel suspension. A split in the GOP? | Opinion

With Jerry Moran, you take what you can get.

It would be nice, for example, to see Kansas’ senior senator take a bold stand for the First Amendment and against President Donald Trump’s crackdown on free speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

That’s not quite what we got from Moran after ABC suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel last week under pressure from the Trump administration. (Disney announced Monday the show will return to the air on Tuesday.)

“We all should be very cautious,” Moran told Politico. “The conservative position is free speech is free speech, and we better be very careful about any lines we cross in diminishing free speech.”

And, well, it’s better than nothing.

But you don’t have to look very far to see stronger statements from some of Moran’s fellow Senate conservatives, who see the danger in letting any government — Democratic or Republican — decide what kind of speech is permissible.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, for example, said it was “dangerous as hell” for Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr to demand that ABC take Kimmel off the airwaves.

“If the government gets in the business of saying, ‘We don’t like what you, the media, have said; we’re going to ban you from the airwaves if you don’t say what we like’ — that will end up bad for conservatives,” Cruz said.

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, meanwhile, didn’t mind seeing Kimmel go by the wayside, but on NBC he said “the FCC was wrong to weigh in” on Kimmel’s job future.

“I’ll fight any attempt by the government to get involved with speech, I will fight,” Paul added.

See? It can be done.

Making excuses for a crackdown

If Moran’s reaction to the Kimmel suspension was too mild for my tastes, though, it was still better than what his Kansas and Missouri colleagues offered.

During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas made excuses for the FCC.

“The FCC didn’t fire” Kimmel, Marshall said. “He was fired because he was ignorant, that he had inflammatory remarks, bad ratings, and those types of things.”

That ignores, of course, that Carr last week publicly told ABC affiliates that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and that there would be “additional work for the FCC ahead” if the network didn’t crack down on Kimmel.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri walked a weird middle ground — defending Kimmel’s right to say dumb stuff while also applauding the suspension.

“He’s entitled under the First Amendment to say what he wants,” Hawley told reporters. “But on the other hand, I applaud the move of Disney, his corporate parent, to say, ‘We think this is terrible.’”

It was Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri, though, who had the worst response.

‘Hypocrisy is not a justification for tyranny’

Schmitt, you’ll remember, has styled himself as a free speech warrior. As Missouri’s attorney general, he went after the Biden administration for pressuring social media companies to restrict misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines — a move that Schmitt said silenced the voices of conservatives.

Now, though, he doesn’t care about government speech crackdowns.

“Being lectured by Democrats over free speech after the last four years is nauseating,” Schmitt posted Friday on X. “Kimmel was cancelled because he was an unfunny activist who identified as a comedian—and made light of a national tragedy and people were outraged.”

He concluded: “Outside of the Leftwing bubble no one cares.”

Maybe Schmitt is right about one thing: Perhaps Democrats are being hypocritical. Some experts say that government lobbying of private companies can veer into “jawboning” that threatens free speech, though not everyone agrees that’s apples to apples.

But as Eric Levitz of Vox said last week: “Hypocrisy is not a justification for tyranny.”

The truth is, you’re a true defender of free speech if you still defend it when somebody is saying something you don’t like. It’s easy — pointless, really — only to care about the free speech of people who agree with you.

Schmitt — along with Marshall and Hawley — fails that test egregiously. Moran only barely passes.

There will be more tests to come. Trump last week told reporters that news coverage criticizing him is “illegal.”

It’s not. At least not yet.

This story was originally published September 22, 2025 at 1:38 PM with the headline "Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran questions Kimmel suspension. A split in the GOP? | Opinion."