U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.) led a letter co-signed by all of his Republican Senate colleagues calling on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to explain it’s inappropriate attempts to impact the editorial decisions in newsrooms nationwide.

In recent weeks, Americans learned that the FCC was attempting to move forward with a Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs (CIN Study), which posed highly inappropriate questions of news editors about how they select stories, station bias, and even about their “news philosophy.” After the study received national condemnation, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler suspended the study last Friday and indicated that the survey would be subsequently “revised.”

“It is impossible to imagine a rationale for the Commission to consider using the CIN Study under any circumstance given its flagrantly unconstitutional implications,” the Senators wrote. “We demand an explanation of how the Commission internally justified the CIN Study as fulfilling its statutory requirement to report on market barriers to entry, as well as the costs incurred by the Commission on this blatantly inappropriate study. We also insist all commissioners be involved in future statutorily required studies in order to guard against the clear potential for abuse.”