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Jamie Raskin taught constitutional law for decades, and on Wednesday the Maryland Democrat took House Republicans to school on the First Amendment.
The lesson came during a House Oversight Committee hearing at which Republicans tried to harness their obsessions with Hunter Biden’s laptop and "Big Tech" into something resembling a coherent complaint. As NBC News reported Wednesday:
The witnesses were called before the committee to answer questions about the platform's [Twitter's] handling of New York Post reporting in 2020 about the alleged contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, in which the social media company controversially blocked users from tweeting and direct-messaging about it.
Raskin blasted the Republican-led effort as a “trivial pursuit,” pointing out that under the First Amendment, which applies to government action, private companies can curate content however they want.
“Twitter is a private media company,” the panel’s top Democrat apparently needed to remind his GOP counterparts.
That means, as Raskin noted, that Twitter can ban Donald Trump for inciting violent insurrection, or go in a new direction under Elon Musk and reinstate the unrepentant Trump to the platform.
On the flip side, Raskin observed that the First Amendment’s robust protections don’t provide the right to incite imminent violence as Trump did. Raskin invoked the “Brandenburg” principle, which references the Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which said that speech is unprotected when it's "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
If that case sounds familiar in connection with Trump and Raskin in particular, that's because the Democratic congressman previously provided a constitutional lesson on it during Trump's second impeachment in 2021:
Wednesday’s hearing is the latest sign that we’re in for a long, strange ride with the MAGA Republicans of the 118th Congress. But if they pay attention, they might just learn something. In the likely event that they don’t, however, the public can still benefit from these legal lessons.