(RepublicanNews.org) – One-hundred and four Republican representatives joined with their Democratic colleagues to continue funding for online government surveillance programs through the 2025 military appropriations bill.
On Wednesday, June 26th, the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of efforts by the Biden administration to censor Americans on social media platforms, 104 GOP members of the U.S. House of Representatives banded together to vote for keeping an increased budget for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia proposed the amendment (H. Rept. 118-559) to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, which would maintain funding for CISA for the 2025 version of the act at roughly the same levels as the previous year with only a slight 2% decrease.
CISA, which has been described as the government surveillance apparatus’ “nerve center,” would have received exactly $2,437,285,000 from the original proposed 2025 appropriations legislation that was introduced by GOP Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada on June 14. The amendment only reduced it to $2,379,485,000.
Clyde criticized the CISA during an address to the House floor, chiding the agency for censoring Americans and proclaiming no additional funds should be provided toward continuing its operations, which he called unconstitutional. Regardless of Clyde’s remarks, the amendment hardly reduced the budget at all even if it also didn’t increase it, and critics believe Republicans folded on the matter too quickly without putting up much of a fight.
The same day of the vote, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that would permit the Biden administration to continue collaborating directly with Big Tech platforms in order to curtail supposed “misinformation” and “disinformation,” effectively allowing social media platforms to violate freedom of speech by working with the government while the 2024 presidential election is only a few months away.
Clyde also reintroduced an act to revoke funding for any government entities that either classify or support classifying free speech as disinformation or misinformation, as well as those that “direct or instruct” censoring speech, which includes CISA.
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