Democrats Demand Carr’s Resignation Over Kimmel

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18, 2025 – Democratic lawmakers are calling for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr to resign, saying the Republican leader’s comments Wednesday pressured ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show. 

Carr “has disgraced the office he holds by bullying ABC, the employer of Jimmy Kimmel, and forcing the company to bend the knee to the Trump administration,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and other top House Democrats said in a statement. “FCC Chair Brendan Carr should resign immediately.”

The Democrats suggested that if they take power in the House in 2027, they would launch a probe into Carr’s conduct, saying. “House Democrats will make sure the American people learn the truth, even if that requires the relentless unleashing of congressional subpoena power. This will not be forgotten.”

Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, said Thursday morning that he was launching a probe into ABC, Sinclair, and the Trump administration, but Republicans on the committee later blocked an effort to subpoena Carr.

Senate Democrats also bashed the FCC chairman, with members of the Commerce Committee penning a letter urging him to “immediately stop threatening media organizations” and asking for written answers to questions.

“Carr should resign,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly told Politico Thursday. “I can’t think of a greater threat to free speech than Carr in many, many years. He’s despicable. He’s anti-American. He ought to resign, and Trump ought to fire him.”

The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on lawmakers’ statements.

Kimmel said on his Monday night show that “the MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize the kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

The alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, grew up in a conservative household in Utah, but Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, had said in a Monday interview with NBC News that investigators determined he had a “leftist ideology” that was “very different from his family’s.”

Carr went on conservative podcaster Benny Johnson’s show Wednesday and said Kimmel appeared to have been intentionally deceptive about what motivated the high-profile conservative activist’s alleged killer.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

He added “I think it’s really past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say ‘We’re not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out, because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC if we continue to run content that ends up being a pattern of news distortion.’” 

Sinclair and Nexstar, which own local broadcast stations that hold FCC licenses, said later on Wednesday they wouldn’t play Kimmel’s show on their stations, which collectively make up 66 of ABC’s 230 affiliates. ABC soon after said it would pull the show nationwide for an indeterminate amount of time.

Johnson shared a clip of the interview on X Wednesday night with the caption “This is what got Kimmel fired. Right here. Watch.”

“It’s called soft power. The Left uses it all the time. Thanks to President Trump, the Right has learned how to wield power as well,” he wrote.

Carr’s comments were widely criticized by Democrats and progressives as threatening free speech and prompting the suspension, from former President Barack Obama to FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, who said the agency was “seizing on a late-night comedian’s inopportune joke as a pretext to punish speech it disliked.”

Gomez said if the agency actually acted to undermine or revoke any broadcast licenses over the issue, it would likely fail under the First Amendment, which restricts the government’s ability to punish speech.

“But even the threat to revoke a license is no small matter. It poses an existential risk to a broadcaster, which by definition cannot exist without its license,” she said in a statement. “That makes billion-dollar companies with pending business before the agency all the more vulnerable to pressure to bend to the government’s ideological demands.”

Nexstar has a $6.2 billion merger with fellow broadcaster TEGNA  that will require FCC approval. The deal, which has not been submitted to the agency, would create the largest station owner in the country, and would require the FCC to issue a waiver or alter its broadcast ownership rules.

The agency is set to vote at its Sept. 30 meeting on whether to seek input on revisiting some of those rules, but not the key one Nexstar needs. That’s on a separate track.

Republican FCC Commissioner Olivia Trusty was asked about the issue at a Free State Foundation event Thursday, and emphasized the legal standard for licensees to operate in the public interest. 

“I firmly believe in the First Amendment. I think it protects fundamental freedoms that are essential to the functioning of a democratic society,” she said. “Nexstar and Sinclair made a business decision to remove, or at least suspend, the Jimmy Kimmel show because they did not believe it was in the public interest for their viewers.”

Of Carr’s comments she said, “I’m not his spokesperson, I’ll defer to him to further explain that. But under the law we have a responsibility to make sure broadcasters are complying with their public interest obligations, and that’s what I’m committed to doing.”

Carr said on CNBC Thursday he expected broadcasters to continue dropping shows from national programmers, who he said on another conservative podcast Thursday could in recent years use market power to force stations to play “liberal foie gras coming out of New York and Hollywood.” 

“We are in the midst of a massive shift in dynamics in the media ecosystem, for lots of reasons, including the permission structure that President Trump’s election has provided,” he said on CNBC. “I would simply say we’re not done yet with seeing the consequences of that shift.”