Elon Musk’s political views should not impact California decision on SpaceX launches | Opinion

Whatever you have to say about mega-MAGA-billionaire Elon Musk’s political persona, in the real world, his impact is outsize and positive.

In electric cars with Tesla, he’s turned the Toyota Prius, an object of pity, into the Tesla Model Y, an object of envy among consumers and auto execs alike. On the internet with Starlink, he’s outpaced government programs costing hundreds of billions of dollars to provide high-speed data nearly everywhere, including in the wake of recent hurricanes where terrestrial infrastructure is a tangled, inoperable mess.

In orbit with SpaceX, his technological feats — relanding a reusable rocket in the arms of its launch pad just this month — have turned a colony on Mars from Hollywood dream to plausible goal.

But boy, the guy’s political views are a nightmare. When a Nazi-sympathetic “historian” was interviewed by a credulous Tucker Carlson, Musk used his X social media megaphone to spread the word.

With Donald Trump in a statistical dead heat in his effort to return to the White House, Musk is backing Trump’s promised “dictatorship” with tens of millions of dollars in campaign money. With a multibillion-dollar investment, Musk has turned Twitter, which once reasonably aspired to be our nation’s town hall, into a XXX riddled with hate and porn.

Last week, Musk’s positive and negative sides collided before a barely-known government board in California that turned down SpaceX’s plan to boost the number of rocket launches at Golden State Air and Space Force base from 36 a year to 50.

Before voting to deny the Air Force’s request for approval on the rocket launches, California Coastal Commission Chair Caryl Hart said, “We’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race.”

Another voting member of the commission complained, “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA.” Two others expressed concerns about Musk’s views.

On Tuesday, Musk filed suit in federal court in Los Angeles alleging that the Coastal Commission violated his First Amendment rights by holding his political views against him in a government proceeding that is supposed to be about the environment and the commission’s concerns about wetlands, birds and such.

It would be easier to believe there were serious environmental concerns if the commission had not just approved the 36 launches in August, or if big new environmental concerns had arisen in the two months since.

Musk is right. His case is a slam dunk. The fact that Musk is the world’s wealthiest man has nothing to do with the reality that his odious views are well within the First Amendment rights we all enjoy.

A Republican prosecutor can’t go into court and demand that a bank robber get a longer sentence because he is a Democrat. A Democratic city council man can’t announce at a council meeting that going forward he will vote against all development proposals filed by Trump supporters.

All Americans have the right for government agencies to make decisions about them on the merits, not politics.

If commissioners were willing to go after Musk’s political views out in the open, just wait until the lawyers get the commissioners’ and staffers’ emails and other written communications. The level of vitriol aimed at Musk will make SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy seem like small potatoes.

Among the most frightening aspects of the Trump era has been “The Apprentice” star’s bulldozing of any standards of behavior that get in his way. He tried to overthrow an election through demagoguery, dishonesty and violence.

At the same time, among the most frustrating aspects of the Trump era has been his opponents’ abandonment of bedrock Constitutional norms in response.

That’s what the California Coastal Commission has done and that’s why their decision cannot stand up to judicial scrutiny.

This story was originally published October 17, 2024 at 9:34 AM with the headline "Elon Musk’s political views should not impact California decision on SpaceX launches | Opinion."