H.R. 2029: Stop Comstock Act

H.R. 2029 is a deletion bill. It creates no program, spends no money, and writes no new crime. It strikes words out of four federal laws and lets whatever survives stand on its own.

The centerpiece is the mail statute. Today it declares nonmailable a long list running from obscene and “indecent” material through articles for producing abortion and information about where to get them. The bill throws out that entire opening and replaces it with a single line: all obscene materials are declared nonmailable. Everything on the current list that is not obscenity would simply stop being federal law.

The companion law covering common carriers and online services gets the same treatment, narrowed to “any obscene material.” The bill also repairs a cross-reference inside that law, which has pointed at the wrong subsection of the federal definition of an interactive computer service.

A third piece reaches federal employees. As written, an officer or agent who knowingly helps someone import or mail “means for procuring abortion, or other articles of indecent or immoral use or tendency” can face up to ten years. H.R. 2029 strikes the abortion and immoral-tendency wording and leaves the obscenity and treason clauses in place.

At the border, the import law currently bars any article that is “obscene or immoral, or any drug or medicine or any article whatever for causing unlawful abortion,” and seized goods are destroyed by court order. The bill removes the immoral-articles and abortion clauses, and with them an old exception that had let those same drugs enter in bulk. The Treasury Secretary's discretion to admit literary and scientific classics survives untouched.

The bill answers the fight over what this 150-year-old language covers by removing the language rather than by defining it. Its premise is that wording left in the code stays available to whoever wants to reach for it later, and that dormant is not the same as repealed.