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WASHINGTON — The vote landed quietly, but the implications didn’t. A U.S. House subcommittee moved Thursday to amend the SCREEN Act, pushing it one step closer to becoming federal law and putting site-based age verification for adult content squarely on a national track. With the amendment approved, the bill now heads to the full Committee on Energy and Commerce for review.
Behind the scenes, the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade has been busy stitching together a broader package of online safety legislation, with the Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net (SCREEN) Act sitting near the center of it all. This isn’t a sudden burst of concern—it’s been building, piece by piece, vote by vote.
When Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois first introduced the bill in February, the enforcement teeth were already baked in. Violations of the SCREEN Act would be treated as violations of the Federal Trade Commission Act, meaning they’d fall under the umbrella of unfair or deceptive acts or practices. In plain terms: civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation. That kind of number tends to get people’s attention.
On Thursday, Rep. Craig Goldman of Texas framed his amended version as familiar territory. Speaking to the subcommittee, he said it “follows the same playbook as Texas,” a nod to HB 1181—the state age-verification law that ignited the Supreme Court case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton.
“It updates the SCREEN Act to align it with the successful Texas statute, and federalizes it across the country,” Goldman said. “The protections that the courts have already upheld for children in Texas should not stop at our border. Every child in America deserves the same consistent standard of safety as a child in Texas has. We must protect children from harmful online content, and we can accomplish this better by updating the SCREEN Act.”
The amended version tweaks the bill’s language in several places, though not in ways that clearly mirror Texas’ law line for line. That distinction matters more than it might sound like at first glance.
“This is not a mirror of the Texas law,” industry attorney Lawrence Walters observed. “It would likely render the Texas law unenforceable due to federal preemption.”
Federal law already tends to trump state law, but the amendment doesn’t leave much room for interpretation. It includes an explicit declaration of supremacy, stating, “No State or political subdivision of a State may prescribe, maintain, or enforce any law, rule, regulation, requirement, standard, or other provision having the force and effect of law, if such law, rule, regulation, requirement, standard, or other provision relates to the provisions of this Act.”
Right now, roughly half of U.S. states have their own age-verification laws on the books. If the SCREEN Act becomes law, those state rules wouldn’t just coexist—they’d be overridden.
For now, the amendment cleared the subcommittee by a voice vote, sending it onward to the full Committee on Energy and Commerce. It’s not the final word, but it’s a clear signal. The question isn’t whether this debate is going national—it’s how much ground will shift once it does.
