VIEWPOINT | First Amendment must come first, keep kids truly safe from intrusive Senate bill

Guest column by Aaron Levisay

While new technology comes with its benefits, our rapidly changing, increasingly online world presents a range of new dangers that parents like me often struggle to keep up with. It’s easy to see why some might think we need better tools to help limit kids’ access.

But what we don’t need is Congress to step in. That’s exactly what Senate Bill 1409, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) intends to do—and the South Dakota delegation in D.C. should reject it. 

POINT: South Dakota senators failed to protect children from pornography
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As it so often does, the federal government is taking a good idea (protection of kids) and ending up empowering (yet another) set of taxpayer-funded bureaus and agencies that will determine, in the end, what they will and won’t “protect” our children (and us) from. Decades from now, you can be sure the agency will have expanded its reach to include ideas that most definitely aren’t harmful.

You can tell the bill, sponsored by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., is poorly written just by looking at the very last page of the bill (this is known as the “severability” portion):

“If any provision of this Act, or an amendment made by this Act, is determined to be unenforceable or invalid, the remaining provisions of this Act and the amendments made by this Act shall not be affected.”

Now, if you put language like that in a statute, it means that the drafters — most likely congressional staffers and committee lawyers, rather than the actual senators themselves — are already aware of the First Amendment issues inherent in the text itself. “Invalid” is another way of saying the judiciary is going to rule against it on constitutional grounds. “Unenforceable” is a slightly lesser way of stating the same thing — meaning agencies and bureaucrats lack constitutional power and authority, and probably legislative appropriations, to be getting involved. 

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