Until last week, Stephen Colbert was a fairly innocuous fixture in American media, a late-night host who’d sanded down his edges as he assumed what was once one of the most coveted slots on television.

Now, after CBS announced the end of his show, which came as its parent company, Paramount, pursues a merger that requires government approval, some progressive Democrats are taking up his cause as their own.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut warned in a video posted to social media that the ouster of a prominent Trump critic like Colbert showed that the country was “entering a censorship state.” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts posted that the country “deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.” She later added that the corporate maneuvers and settlements swirling ahead of the potential merger “could be bribery in plain sight.”

“We have to speak out critically of those who capitulate,” said Senator Adam Schiff of California, in an 11-minute video he posted to X (in which he humble-bragged that he’d learned of the firing earlier than most because he’d been a guest on the show when Colbert announced it).

The Democratic caucus, though, is far from agreed on whether voters really care.

Over the last six months, as President Trump has rammed his agenda through Congress and bulldozed parts of the federal government, Democrats have struggled to home in on a single message. Polling suggests that they’ve made inroads in casting the president’s signature domestic policy bill as a giveaway for the rich at the expense of regular Americans. And they’ve spent much of the last couple of weeks seeking to exacerbate Republican divisions over Trump’s handling of the government’s files relating to Jeffrey Epstein.

Not everybody’s sure they should add Colbert — a well-compensated denizen of a dying medium — to their plate.