Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, on Friday harshly criticized Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, accusing him of mafia-like tactics and saying his threat to retaliate against media companies for speech on their airwaves was “dangerous as hell.”
Mr. Cruz was reacting to Mr. Carr’s threat to revoke ABC’s broadcast license because of remarks by the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel during a Monday night telecast about the assassination of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
The remarks from Cruz, who is closely aligned with the president and one of the most conservative members of the Senate, were the latest evidence that some on the right are deeply uncomfortable with their fellow Republicans’ efforts to clamp down on free speech by their political adversaries following Mr. Kirk’s death.
Mr. Cruz said Mr. Kimmel had been “lying” in the monologue that prompted ABC to pull his show, in which the comedian said that conservatives had been trying to portray Mr. Kirk’s assassin as “anything other than one of them.” But the senator also took Mr. Carr to task for suggesting on a right-wing podcast that if media companies did not shut down such statements, the federal government would step in do so.
“He says, ‘We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.’” Mr. Cruz said on his podcast “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” quoting Mr. Carr verbatim. “And I’ve got to say, that’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
He went on to warn that a crackdown on speech on the left by the Trump administration would come back to bite conservatives the next time Democrats hold the White House.
“They will silence us,” Mr. Cruz said. “They will use this power, and they will use it ruthlessly. And that is dangerous.”
Since the assassination of Mr. Kirk, President Trump has increasingly threatened to use the federal government to silence dissent, including warning that regulators could strip broadcasters of their licenses if they air negative coverage of him.
“I think Brendan Carr is a great American patriot,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday. “So I disagree with Ted Cruz on that.”
Mr. Cruz also praised Mr. Carr as “a good guy.”
“I work closely with him,” the senator said. “But what he said there is dangerous as hell.”
Even in the House, where the president often enjoys airtight support from the Republican majority, a handful of G.O.P. members this week said they could not back efforts to stifle speech with which they disagreed.
Four Republicans broke with their party on Tuesday and blocked an effort by G.O.P. Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina to censure Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, over a social media post she recirculated after Mr. Kirk’s assassination that was critical of him.
Three of the four later said they had voted to kill Ms. Mace’s measure because of free speech concerns.
“The right response to reprehensible speech like this isn’t silencing: it’s more speech,” Representative Jeff Hurd, Republican of Colorado, wrote in a post on social media, even as he called Ms. Omar’s comments about Mr. Kirk and his supporters “ghoulish and evil.”
Representative Tom McClintock, Republican of California, wrote: “A free society depends on tolerating ALL speech — even hateful speech — confident that the best way to sort good from evil is to put the two side by side and trust the people to know the difference.”