Judge AliKhan questions Brendan Carr over ABC license fight

By Adele Rutherford · Reporting from Atlanta · October 6, 2026

Disney told a federal judge that the FCC's early license review threatens a corporate death penalty, and the bench rightly saw through the pretext.

Procedure is the shield we have

Procedure is where power lives, and the Federal Communications Commission under Brendan Carr has decided to make a bonfire of the rules. On October 6, 2026, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan of Washington, D.C. heard arguments in Disney v. FCC, a lawsuit brought by ABC and its parent company after the regulator ordered early renewal applications for eight local stations. Those licenses were not due until between 2028 and 2031. They were pulled forward not by administrative routine, but by presidential grievance.

As Politico, CNN, The Guardian, and CBS News report, the dispute traces directly back to editorial clashes between the network and the executive branch. Donald Trump attacked ABC for not airing his July address and demanded the firing of Jimmy Kimmel after monologues touching on conservative activist Charlie Kirk and First Lady Melania Trump. The commission responded with inquiries into Disney’s diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and equal-time rule scrutiny over political interviews on The View.

The strongest opposing case for the government rests on statutory exclusivity. Dimitar P Georgiev, arguing for the Justice Department, maintained that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia lacks jurisdiction to review a pending agency order. He insisted that ABC is merely a regulated entity undergoing routine oversight and must exhaust administrative remedies before appealing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. That argument has the superficial tidiness of administrative law text. But it collapses when the regulatory tool is wielded as a cudgel. An agency cannot manufacture a discovery dispute over DEI records to mask viewpoint retaliation, then hide behind exhaustion doctrines while the clock runs down on a network's right to broadcast.

The guillotine drops on the first amendment

Beth Wilkinson, attorney for ABC, put the stakes plainly before the court. She described the early renewal order as a corporate death penalty, telling Judge AliKhan that the network’s head is resting on a guillotine while executives wonder if every editorial choice will bring the blade down. The chilling effect is immediate and documented. ABC has ceased booking politicians on The View, and Jimmy Kimmel posted an interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on YouTube rather than airing it on television.

This is the exact mechanism of Near v. Minnesota, the landmark 1931 Supreme Court decision where prior restraint on publication was found to violate freedom of the press. Anthony Lewis called Near the Court's first great press case because it recognized that government suppression does not always take the form of an outright ban; often it is the steady, coercive pressure of official retaliation designed to induce self-censorship. When an FCC chair trained in the administrative arts—and steeped in the blueprint of Project 2025—uses licensing authorities to punish broadcasters for editorial slights, the First Amendment ceases to be a living shield and becomes a permission slip for the executive.

We have seen this script before, though the actors change their costumes. In FCC v. Fox Television Stations, a regulatory body used its discretionary authority to penalize broadcasters for content that offended prevailing sensibilities. During the 2020 United States election, executive officials similarly leaned on administrative levers to target critical media outlets. But the current gambit by Brendan Carr goes further, weaponizing the structural timeline of license renewals to bypass the First Amendment entirely.

A judge who knows the record

Judge AliKhan proved remarkably unimpressed by the government's procedural gymnastics. Pointing directly to the timing, she asked Justice Department lawyers why the commission suddenly discovered woefully inadequate responses in the summer, and stated from the bench: “It strikes me with all the comments that we have from the president and from Commissioner Brendan Carr that this is merely over a discovery dispute.”

That observation goes to the heart of the matter. If a regulator can pull forward a broadcast license by years simply because an agency enforcement bureau dislikes a network's answers in a civil rights probe, no licensed entity in America has secure tenure. A rule that only works while your people hold power was never a rule at all. The day will come when a different administration sits in Washington, holding the same administrative tools, eyeing the same broadcast licenses.

Judge AliKhan took the matter under advisement and ordered both parties to provide additional materials and responses by Wednesday, October 14. If the judiciary is to retain any claim to impartiality, it must refuse to let administrative exhaustion doctrine become an accomplice to executive coercion. The district court has jurisdiction because the constitutional injury alleged by ABC falls entirely outside the legitimate scope of statutory ratemaking. When the state deploys the licensing power to punish a network for its news coverage, the courts must step in.

Judge AliKhan questions Brendan Carr over ABC license fight

Procedure is the shield we have

The guillotine drops on the first amendment

A judge who knows the record

Sources