WASHINGTON — Sen. Ed Markey has a new name for the Federal Communications Commission: the "Federal Censorship Commission."

The Massachusetts Democrat fired off a letter Thursday to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr demanding the agency rescind a late-April order forcing Disney to file early renewal applications for all eight of its ABC-owned broadcast stations — an order issued one day after President Donald Trump publicly demanded ABC fire late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.

"This action is the latest and most reckless step in your use of the FCC's licensing authority as a cudgel against broadcasters whose editorial choices displease the President," Markey wrote in the letter, dated May 7. "You have effectively converted the FCC's authority over the public airwaves into an instrument of presidential retribution against constitutionally protected speech."

He demanded the FCC "immediately rescind this order and explain its conduct."

Kimmel triggered the chain on April 23, when he opened his ABC late-night show with a joke describing Melania Trump as having "the glow of an expectant widow." Within days, both the President and the First Lady had publicly demanded ABC fire him.

The FCC moved on April 28. Carr's office issued an order requiring Disney to file renewal paperwork for every ABC-owned broadcast station within 30 days — by May 28 — even though most of those licenses were not otherwise up for renewal until 2028.

Carr has publicly insisted the early-renewal order is unrelated to Kimmel and is instead tied to a separate, prior FCC review of Disney's diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.

"They were playing rope a dope," Carr told The Hollywood Reporter of ABC's stance, batting away the timing.

Markey is not buying it.

In a public statement accompanying the letter, Markey wrote that the FCC is "once again targeting broadcasters who don't flatter Donald Trump" and said he is "leading my colleagues in demanding they stop this unconstitutional attack on free speech."

He is not alone inside the agency itself. Anna Gomez, the lone Democratic commissioner on the FCC, has called the Disney license action "the FCC's most egregious attack on the First Amendment to date."

Broadcast television licenses are a federal grant to use the public airwaves, ordinarily renewed every eight years. Forcing early renewal gives the FCC an immediate window to scrutinize — and potentially condition or deny — a station's right to operate. For ABC, that scrutiny window now covers eight major-market stations across the country.

If the FCC declines to renew, those stations go off the air.

That, Markey says, is the cudgel Carr is now wielding — and the one he is asking the chairman to put down.