If you’re put off by freedom-hating bully Attorneys General trying to shut down speech, or the Democratic Party’s crusade to inhibit political expression by overturning Citizens United, or you thought the Fairness Doctrine was basically censorship, I’m not sure how you rationalize supporting the GOP Senate’s investigation into the conduct of Facebook.

Though I suppose in this case many liberals will say that corporations like Facebook deserve the same constitutional protections as regular people, the Left has been willing to allow government to dictate what kind of cake Americans have to bake, who they have to let into their bathrooms, what ingredients they must not put in their food and whose contraception they must buy. Conservatives have, in the past few years, avoided such intrusions. Do they now want to create precedents for the Democratic Senate to shape speech codes for private companies in the future?

In fact, the very threat of investigating something completely legal—conduct that is, in various forms, widespread in the mass media—is already harassment. Mere days after we learned that the journalists sold us a pack of lies about the Iran Deal, the most important thing Sen. John Thune (Grandstand, ND) can think to do is demand that Facebook “answer these serious allegations” and “hold those responsible to account if there has been political bias in the dissemination of trending news.”

Must it?

I mean, does Facebook even have to link to any conservative news stories? And do we really want the Senate defining what constitutes “conservative” news, anyway?