Weaponized Government Threatens Free Speech: Jonathan Williams on The Hugh Hewitt Show

As debates over government power, spending, and tax policy intensify in Washington, states are leading the way on reform while pushing back against political overreach. In his latest appearance on The Hugh Hewitt Show, ALEC President and Chief Economist Jonathan Williams highlighted state-level actions to address spending and debt, as well as ALEC’s filing of an amicus brief challenging government “weaponization” on free speech grounds.

The conversation opened with a discussion of ALEC’s filing of an amicus brief in First Choice Women’s Resource Center v. Platkin, a U.S. Supreme Court case challenging New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin’s sweeping demand for donor lists from a nonprofit pregnancy care provider. The case raised critical concerns about donor privacy, free speech, and access to federal courts.

“It’s a key case here in terms of this whole problem that we’ve been seeing across the country that President Trump’s trying to address, our good friend and ALEC alumnus, Jim Jordan in the House Judiciary Committee, and that, of course, is the weaponization of government,” Williams said.

At the center of the dispute is a subpoena demanding donor records from the organization. “It’s clearly an example of big government overreach targeting potentially a group that they don’t agree with,” Williams argued. When the center sought relief, both the district court and the Third Circuit refused, ruling the subpoena had not been enforced. “We thought that was wrong,” he continued, pointing to ALEC’s own history of being targeted in “states like Minnesota and Maine” by “liberal officials in blue states, and that’s why we wanted to come to the defense of our friends there in New Jersey.”

Hewitt then shifted the discussion toward state tax policy, raising the long-debated Kansas tax experiment. Critics have pointed to Kansas’s struggles after then-Gov. Sam Brownback’s 2012 income tax cuts, but Williams rejected that characterization.

“This has been something in my career where, I’ve not seen a lie get this much attention, and that is a lie around the Kansas tax experiment,” Williams emphasized. “From day one, the kind of fake news economist Paul Krugman … wrote a column about how the Kansas tax cuts were destroying the state.” For years afterward, he added, “if we had good ALEC members trying to cut taxes in their state, the first argument out of the gate would be, you can’t cut taxes because look what it did to the state of Kansas.”

The real problem, Williams argued, was not the tax cuts but unchecked government spending. “You must match tax cuts with good spending policy and make sure that you don’t increase spending while you’re cutting taxes,” he explained. Kansas has since rebounded, he noted, crediting ALEC member and Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson. “This Kansas story that started out in a very troubled way … now, because of bold conservative leadership … they’ve come full circle, and they’re going to have a 4% flat tax.”

The interview concluded with a turn to Washington’s own fiscal challenges—specifically the national debt. Williams underscored the urgency.

“We’re at 37 trillion reasons why,” he said, referring to the national debt. With interest costs now one of the government’s largest expenditures, ALEC has joined state financial officers in urging Congress to follow state models of fiscal restraint. “We’re asking for Congress to basically do what the states do every single year, that is, try to live within their means, have some sort of a balanced budget discussion.”

Without reforms, Williams warned, the U.S. risks fiscal crisis. “We cannot continue down this trajectory of continuing to add more and more debt.”