FCC Threat Erupts Over Super Bowl

A Super Bowl halftime show meltdown exposed a deeper problem most Americans never hear about: U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico still don’t receive the full constitutional protections other Americans take for granted.

Story Snapshot

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime set ignited political backlash, including claims he “isn’t American,” despite Puerto Ricans being U.S. citizens.
Rep. Randy Fine threatened an FCC complaint over alleged explicit lyrics, but reporting indicates the broadcast was pre-censored and the threat lacked legal footing.
The controversy reopened scrutiny of the “Insular Cases,” Supreme Court precedents that treat U.S. territories as constitutionally second-class.
Justice Neil Gorsuch has already urged the Court to overrule the Insular Cases, calling their logic indefensible and rooted in ugly stereotypes.

What Actually Happened at Super Bowl LX—and What Didn’t

Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rico-born U.S. citizen, performed the Super Bowl LX halftime show on February 8, 2026, delivering a set centered on Puerto Rican culture and Spanish-language lyrics. The next day, Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) publicly threatened to pursue FCC action against NBC and the NFL, alleging indecency. Coverage of the broadcast, however, indicated the network feed had already censored the lyrics at issue, weakening the premise for any FCC penalty.

That matters because the FCC’s indecency enforcement is narrow and typically tied to what actually airs over regulated channels—not what critics assume was said. In this case, reports described Fine demanding “dramatic action,” including license reviews, even though no confirmed violation was identified. With no FCC response reported at the time, the episode read less like a serious regulatory dispute and more like a political flare-up aimed at a high-profile cultural moment.

Citizenship Confusion Became the Headline—But the Law Is the Story

Online commentary also included claims that Bad Bunny was “not an American artist,” a statement that conflicts with Puerto Rico’s legal status. Congress granted statutory U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans in 1917, and Puerto Ricans routinely serve in the U.S. military and hold U.S. passports. The real civic problem is not whether Puerto Ricans are citizens; it’s that citizenship has not guaranteed equal constitutional treatment under longstanding Supreme Court doctrine.

Puerto Rico has been a U.S. territory since the United States acquired it after the 1898 Spanish-American War. Residents live under federal authority yet lack voting representation in Congress and cannot vote for president while residing on the island. That reality fuels periodic debates about statehood, independence, and the meaning of equal citizenship. The halftime show debate, oddly enough, pushed that unresolved tension into living rooms that normally tune out legal history.

The “Insular Cases” Keep Territories in a Constitutional Grey Zone

The Insular Cases—early 1900s Supreme Court decisions—created a framework where the Constitution does not fully apply in U.S. territories the same way it applies in states. The Court described territories as “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,” effectively giving Congress wider latitude to govern them without extending the full bundle of constitutional protections. Later decisions reinforced this logic, including a 1922 ruling that denied certain jury-trial rights despite citizenship.

For Americans who care about constitutional consistency, that framework is hard to square with the idea of equal rights under the law. Even readers skeptical of today’s culture wars can see the problem: a legal regime that allows Washington to pick and choose which constitutional guarantees apply, depending on geography and political convenience. If the Constitution is a limiting document, treating millions of U.S. citizens as a special category undermines the principle of fixed rights.

Gorsuch’s Warning: The Court Knows This Precedent Is Rotten

The strongest institutional critique highlighted in the coverage came from inside the Supreme Court itself. In a 2022 concurrence in U.S. v. Vaello Madero, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued the Insular Cases have no constitutional foundation and are tied to racial stereotypes that should have no place in American law. That statement is significant because it signals a path for reform: the Court could revisit the doctrine without requiring Congress to rewrite the entire territorial relationship first.

Still, no overruling has occurred, and the current status remains unsettled. That uncertainty invites political actors to use cultural controversies as a proxy fight—arguing about lyrics, language, or “who counts” as American—while the underlying legal question remains unanswered. The more productive debate for a constitutional republic is whether America is comfortable maintaining a second-tier constitutional system for territories that fly the U.S. flag and send their sons and daughters to war.