One Elected Republican Objected to the Press Ban. Fox News Chaired the Pool That Stopped.

Verdicts

The count is one

He is Mike Simpson, who has represented Idaho’s second district since 1998 and sits on the Appropriations Committee. He said it in a hallway at the Capitol on Monday.^[1][2]

“Just because you don’t like what the press is reporting, that’s not the reason to ban the press. You should never ban the press. The press is what keeps us honest.”

He applied the same word, wrong, to a separate proposal from the House Rules Committee chair to bar reporters from the Speaker’s Lobby. He also said he does not expect such bans to reach Congress.

The article that is read as saying two

The piece circulating as evidence of two Republican denouncers is from the New Republic, published on 21 September. Read the article and it says the opposite.^[3]

Its headline is a question: how many Republicans are brave enough to denounce the ban. Its subheading answers it, that it is not a lot. Its first sentence reads that so far only one Republican lawmaker has publicly condemned the decision. The phrase about two Republicans survives only in the web address, which is what happens when a headline is rewritten after publication and the link is already fixed.

The second name people are counting is Thomas Massie, and the article itself says he receives only partial credit, because his post was a joke about the five thousand dollar checks rather than a comment on the ban. We read the post. It contains no criticism of the ban.

The claim that two Republicans denounced the ban is contradicted by the article being cited for it, in its headline and in its opening line.

The claim about private dissent

The second half of that article reports that Republicans privately consider the ban a problem. The source is a single appearance on CNN by Melik Abdul, who said that if you talk to Republicans behind closed doors, everyone acknowledges this is a problem, and that what you hear is that the performative thing the president does is exhausting.^[4]

Two qualifications belong with that. Abdul is a communications consultant and a member of Project 21, a conservative network. He holds no elected office and no party office, and he named no Republican, gave no count and described no method, which leaves the claim unfalsifiable as stated.^[5] In the same segment he volunteered the administration’s own talking point about Biden and press credentials, and the anchor corrected him on air.

We rate this unproven rather than false. Private opinion may well run the way he describes, and there is no way to check it. One consultant characterising unnamed people is not a measurement of a caucus.

What Republicans who did speak said

Several named Republicans addressed the ban on the Sunday programmes. They defended it.^[6]

The 400 agencies figure is the one checkable claim in that group and it does not hold. Credentials were not revoked from hundreds of organisations; a credentialing change required reapplication and many outlets did not reapply. The correction happened live, which is why we rate it rather than leaving it alone.

The Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader have said nothing we could find. Part of the explanation is scheduling, since the Speaker cancelled votes on 16 September and sent the House home for a seven-week recess two days before the ban. That explains only part of it. Simpson was at the Capitol on Monday, and three of the four above answered questions on Sunday television.

Where the conservative objection lives

The pushback from the right has been substantial. Almost none of it came from people who hold office.

Fox News Media signed the joint statement with ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN saying that no administration should restrict a news organisation because it objects to its reporting.^[8] Fox’s Washington bureau chief, as rotating chair of the television pool, sent the notice that stopped pool coverage of the president.^[9] Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich, in her capacity as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said the action violates the First Amendment.^[10]

The same shape in 2025

When the Associated Press was barred from the Oval Office and Air Force One in February 2025 over its refusal to adopt the government’s preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico, the pattern was identical.

One Republican commented. Lisa Murkowski told a reporter in a Capitol hallway that it seemed pretty petty to her, framed as something administrations of both parties had done.^[17] That is milder than Simpson’s remark and it is the whole of the elected-official response we could find. No Republican introduced legislation, signed a letter or joined a brief. The two congressional resolutions condemning attacks on the press drew 25 cosponsors between them, all Democrats.

Meanwhile Fox News, Newsmax and the Wall Street Journal backed the Associated Press as institutions, and more than fifty news organisations signed letters to the chief of staff. Conservative media objected. Elected Republicans did not. That happened nineteen months ago and it is happening again now.

What the courts have actually held

The legal question is live rather than settled, and the distinction that matters is about which room.

In April 2025, Judge Trevor McFadden granted the Associated Press a preliminary injunction. The sentence that has been carried forward since:

He held that the Oval Office and Air Force One are not spaces the press has an affirmative right to enter, but that once the government lets some journalists in, it cannot shut the door on others because of their viewpoints. The injunction issued on that basis.^[15]

The D.C. Circuit then stayed that injunction in part, two to one, as to the Oval Office, Air Force One and Mar-a-Lago, leaving it in force for the East Room. Rehearing was denied in July 2025 and the merits were argued that November. There is still no decision.

The new suit was filed on 21 September in the district court in Washington and assigned to Judge Timothy Kelly, who handled the Acosta credential case in 2018 and decided it on due process grounds without reaching the First Amendment.^[13] A separate argument is now being pressed about the pool itself. Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute put it this way on 18 September: the action is “doubly unconstitutional because the press pool is a ‘public forum’ under the First Amendment, which means the president can’t exclude journalists from it on the basis of their viewpoints.”^[19]

The precedent

The verdicts above are about a week. What follows is why the week matters, and it is the part we think is underweighted in the coverage.

The exclusions got larger each time, and the resistance did not

• 2017Five outlets kept out of a single briefing. The pool still functioned, and organisations that were admitted shared their material with those that were not. The correspondents’ association asked for sharing, not withdrawal.
• 2018One reporter’s credential revoked. A court ordered it restored within days. The case was voluntarily dismissed, so it set no binding rule.
• 2025An entire wire service barred from two venues over a word. An injunction issued, then was stayed in part. Argued on the merits; still undecided.
• 2026Three news organisations barred outright, credentials confiscated, the stated reason being cumulative coverage rather than any single story.

Each step is broader than the last. The institutional response has moved the other way, from a correspondents’ association organising material-sharing in 2017 to, in 2026, a single member of Congress speaking in a hallway.

A remedy that arrives late is a remedy that grants the exclusion

The Associated Press case was argued on the merits ten months ago and has not been decided. During that time the partial stay has allowed the exclusion from the Oval Office and Air Force One to continue. Whatever the eventual ruling, the practical outcome so far is that the access was denied for the whole period in which it mattered. An access dispute that outlasts the news cycle by a year resolves itself in favour of whoever controls the door, regardless of who wins at the end.

The 2025 pool takeover is what made 2026 possible

In February 2025 the White House took the selection of the press pool from the correspondents’ association.^[18] The television networks were not part of that change and kept running their own camera rotation. That is precisely why the refusal in September came from the networks and not from the association: after 2025, print outlets had no lever left to pull, and the networks held the one thing the White House does not control, which is whether to send a crew. A structural change made quietly in one year determined who was able to respond in the next.

The count of one is itself the precedent

Two administrations-worth of press exclusions have now produced one mild objection from an elected Republican each time, no legislation either time, and no letters or briefs either time. Whatever a court eventually decides about the First Amendment, a separate and quieter precedent has been set about the legislative branch, which is that the exclusion of news organisations is not a thing Congress contests. That precedent does not depend on the litigation and will not be reversed by it.