Governing is hard, and there is no doubt that sometimes compromises must be made. That doesn’t mean Republicans should be compromising on State Department censorship of conservatives.
The continuing resolution to fund the government that failed Wednesday included a one-year extension of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. As the Washington Examiner first revealed, the GEC was using taxpayer dollars to fund the “Global Disinformation Index,” which created advertising blacklists to pressure advertisers into cutting off conservative media outlets.
The inclusion of this extension is made all the worse by the fact that the State Department was already preparing to close down the GEC with the expectation that Republicans would not be reauthorizing it. The extension was reportedly included as a demand from Senate Democrats, who did so in exchange for protecting small businesses from certain fines approved by the Biden administration.
Yes, yes, governing is tough, but if Republicans aren’t willing to fight on this hill, what are they willing to do? Democrats want the federal government to bring the hammer down on small businesses, and Republicans can’t turn that into a winning message? Instead, they are going to give in to Senate Democrats demanding the continued funding of a part of the federal government that is actively trying to censor conservative media outlets, because what? Congressional Republicans are too scared of bad press over a government shutdown from a liberal media apparatus that hates them?
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Republicans should be celebrating the demise of the GEC, and if the State Department does intend to simply pawn off the GEC’s responsibilities to other areas of the agency as it told Congress it would, Republicans should be gutting the State Department as well. If Democrats want to go to war over harassing small businesses, Republicans should be taking them up on that offer, instead of tripping over themselves to help liberal bureaucrats continue their censorship blacklists.
It has become an obnoxious cliché, but this is a prime example of how the GOP ended up with the “but he fights” attitude that brought President-elect Donald Trump to the top of the party. Much like the weakness of Democratic foreign policy, Republicans facing government shutdowns are eager to roll over to avoid conflict and, as a result, bring about more conflict. The GOP has shown it can win winnable fights, but congressional Republicans need to be willing to pick those fights in the first place.