Of the many questions posed by those gathered in U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s courtroom last week, the most obvious one of all never came up: Why on earth was anyone here in the first place?
Until now, the military has pursued only a tiny number of criminal cases against retirees for actions that occur after military service has ended. Until now, the idea that the secretary of defense would accuse a lawmaker of treason simply for disagreeing with him would be laughable. Until now, any free-speech debates concerning sitting members of Congress have led to the conclusion that lawmakers ought to have—to borrow from former Chief Justice Earl Warren—the widest possible latitude to express themselves.
And yet there we all were anyway, gathered to see Mark Kelly—the fighter pilot turned astronaut turned U.S. senator—defend his First Amendment rights against an attempt by the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, to silence him and knock down his military retirement rank and pay.
As someone who’s covered 10 secretaries of defense, I’ve never seen anything like what Hegseth is doing—not even close. If Hegseth gets his way, he won’t just be punishing Kelly; he will succeed in dramatically curbing the First Amendment rights of all military retirees, some of the very people who have fought to defend such freedoms.
