admin
Washington is suddenly full of chatter about regulating artificial intelligence, and some of that chatter in the House even tried to deliver clarity rather than chaos. In May 2025, the House passed a controversial provision that would have imposed a 10-year moratorium on state AI rules to create a single federal lane for innovation and commerce. That was a sensible idea for protecting businesses and workers from a thousand different state edicts that would hamper growth.
But instead of building a clear national framework, the Senate yanked the moratorium out of the bill in July 2025, voting overwhelmingly to strip it, which left the country without the kind of federal leadership conservatives should demand. That 99–1 vote was a gut punch to anyone who genuinely cares about American competitiveness and getting our rules right before they ossify into a regulatory drag. The political class talked big about winning the AI race while quietly handing the field to lawyers and local bureaucrats.
The predictable consequence is a state-by-state stampede to regulate AI, producing a patchwork of laws that will suffocate startups and reward the biggest incumbents who can afford armies of lawyers. From California to Colorado to Texas, legislatures are writing different rules that will make compliance a full-time job and innovation a discretionary expense. This isn’t protecting the American worker — it’s strangling the small businesses and entrepreneurs who actually create jobs and prosperity.
Economists and free-market advocates warn that federal preemption could be an economic boon, not a giveaway to Big Tech, by standardizing rules and cutting compliance costs so American firms can scale and compete with China. Letting fifty different rulebooks govern AI is not conservatism; it is regulatory Balkanization that hands advantage to rivals less burdened by legal uncertainty. If you care about growth, defense, and the paycheck in your mailbox, you should prefer clear national rules that protect citizens without killing innovation.
Conservatives should champion pragmatic, light-touch solutions such as regulatory sandboxes that let innovators experiment under supervision, not heavy-handed bans or red tape that lock America out of the next industrial revolution. Proposals like Senator Ted Cruz’s sandbox approach embody the kind of common-sense, innovation-friendly oversight we need: transparency, accountability, and room to experiment without strangling dynamism. Washington’s job ought to be to keep America first, not to cage our startups in a bureaucratic maze.
We must also be clear-eyed about where overregulation leads: to censorship, to handcuffing speech and commerce, and to giving foreign adversaries a strategic leg up while our innovators are slowed by compliance. Conservatives can and should demand accountability for fraud, bias, and dangerous uses of AI, but we must refuse the Biden-era impulse toward ever-expanding regulation that treats technology as a problem to be managed instead of an engine of American renewal.
If patriots want to protect jobs, liberty, and national security, we must push Congress to deliver a single, sensible federal framework that preserves state rights where appropriate but prevents a thousand conflicting local rules from killing growth. Fight for clear liability rules, pro-innovation incentives, and targeted safeguards for privacy and safety — and reject the regulatory panic that masquerades as prudence. America won the 20th century by trusting liberty and enterprise; we can do the same in the age of AI if we don’t let Washington or the left-wing regulatory impulse throw us off the field.
