James Talarico Once Backed a Bill That Could Have Sent You to Jail for Posting Memes

A Democrat running for Senate in Texas as a champion of free expression once voted for a bill that critics say would have made posting the wrong meme a jailable offense. That's the kind of detail that should follow a candidate around for the rest of the campaign, because it tells you something real about instinct. When push came to shove in a committee room, Talarico sided with the impulse to regulate political speech rather than the impulse to leave it alone.

Supporters will say the bill was aimed at disinformation, not humor, and that nobody was trying to lock up teenagers for photoshopping a senator's face onto a llama. Maybe. But that's always the pitch. Every speech-restricting law starts as a narrowly tailored fix for a scary-sounding problem and ends up as a tool that whoever holds power gets to swing at whoever they don't like. Memes are crude, dumb, unfair, and often the sharpest political commentary regular people have access to. A sitting legislator voting for a bill that could criminalize them isn't a technicality, it's a tell.

Talarico wants to run as the guy who gets it, the reasonable Texan who isn't like the rest of his party. Fine. But voters in Texas have watched enough of these campaigns to know that "reasonable" is a marketing label, not a voting record. If he wants credit for restraint, he should explain why he didn't show any when it mattered.