KOSA Advances Out Of House Committee, But Cracks Are Showing

This morning, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a pretty long markup about KOSA, COPPA 2.0, and other bills. The quick summary is that both of those bills passed out of committee and could be taken to the House floor this session.

The longer version, though, is that cracks in the coalition pushing these bills are showing. It’s not clear that there’s a comprehensive vision that gets KOSA over the finish line, and that’s good for protecting kids, protecting privacy, and protecting speech. Because all of these versions of KOSA are an attack on all three of those things (while pretending not to be).

As we’ve described, the new versions discussed today are different from the version that passed the Senate earlier this year. The House leadership doesn’t much like the Senate version, and the new versions don’t seem likely to fix that. Any changes made to shore up support of House leadership seems likely to lose plenty of Democrats.

And while backers of the bills complained that they were voting on a “weakened version,” they also admitted that there were concerns about “unintended consequences” creeping into the bill. This statement from Rep. Kathy Castor, one of the key backers of the bill, is the sound of someone who knows they have a shitty bill on their hands, but wants to pass it anyway:

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), the Democratic co-lead on Bilirakis’s House version, acknowledged the version is a “weakened version” from what passed in the Senate, but urged her colleagues to advance the bill with hopes the language will be changed before going to the full House.

“We can’t allow unintended consequences to creep in, because there were politics played with KOSA here at the eleventh hour,” she said. “I think it’s important today to move it forward with the promise and acknowledgment that we…I don’t know that I could support this version if it comes to the House floor in this manner, but I trust Chair [Cathy] McMorris Rodgers [R-Wash.] and her leadership.”

Throughout the hearing, certain concerns were raised about the bills. It sounds as though many offices, both Republican and Democrat, are concerned about how they will allow the opposing party tremendous leeway in potentially pressuring internet companies to take down speech they dislike.

Thus, Democrats are realizing that KOSA is a bill targeting LGBTQ and abortion info, whereas some Republicans are now calling out how it could be used to pressure companies to remove pro-life content and/or religious content. With folks on both ends realizing that at its heart, KOSA is a censorship bill and will cause problems when “the other side” is in power, hopefully the bill won’t have enough momentum to keep going.

It’s almost amusing to see the opposing sides highlighting how their opposites would abuse the bill. The left-leaning Chamber of Progress is calling out how the Heritage Foundation would use KOSA to censor abortion info:

Meanwhile, some House Republicans are warning their colleagues of the reverse happening:

If both parties are worrying about how the other side might use KOSA to censor content, perhaps everyone can meet in the middle and admit that this is an unconstitutional, First Amendment-ignoring censorship bill, and dump the whole thing in the trash?