Trump Rushes To Stock FCC With Personal Lackeys, Refuses To Seat Dem Commissioners

from the this-is-not-how-functional-governments-work dept

When Trump FCC Boss Brendan Carr isn’t trampling free speech or harassing major networks for platforming comedians, he’s been illegally taking a hatchet to whatever’s left of media consolidation rules and telecom consumer protection oversight.

While he’s been pretty effective at this, Carr would find it even easier to convene meetings and hold agency votes if he had a full 3 member Republican FCC majority. So last Friday he appointed Danielle Thumann Severs, his own longtime personal legal aide, to fill the empty spot. She’d basically be there to do whatever Carr (and Trump) tell her to do.

Like, say, illegally help broadcasters consolidate. Or undermine the agency’s cybersecurity policies. Or collude with right wing executives to manufacture controversies in order to harass media companies that platform politicians Donald Trump and Trump Republicans are afraid of.

Technically Democrats are supposed to hold two FCC commissioner spots as a sort of counterbalance. But unsurprisingly, Carr has made no moves to appoint lone Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez (who has been a very vocal critic of Carr’s sloppy censorship efforts) to another five year term, nor fill the second vacant FCC Democratic seat.

Democrats have responded by stomping their feet a little:

“If President Trump wants to fill these positions, he should do them in a bipartisan way,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), the top Democrat on Commerce’s telecom subcommittee, told POLITICO. “I would certainly hope my Republican colleagues on the committee want to see some semblance of balance as well. Because who’s going to be the next president?”

Republicans do not, it should go without saying, “want to see some semblance of balance.” Over at the FTC, you might recall Trump illegally fired both Democratic FTC Commissioners, and is now just waiting for his lackey-stacked courts to change the law to suit his authoritarian whims (there are some interesting legal differences between the agencies here you may find useful to read about). And should Democrats regain the presidency, it’s very unlikely they respond with any sort of bare-knuckled political retort.

A fully-stocked Dem majority can’t do much beyond publish the occasional press release, but they can throw some procedural sand in the gears of Carr’s mindless deregulation and censorship efforts, which cumulatively can and do matter.

Ideally what guys like Brendan Carr want is an FCC full of bobble-heads to rubber stamp his censorship and “delete delete delete” agency “modernization” agenda, the latter of which often gets obscured in the press by his ham-fisted assault on journalism and the First Amendment. Prison monopolies, telecom monopolies, right wing broadcasters, and robocall scammers have been big fans of these efforts.

Severs has a tight window for confirmation given the looming midterms, but Republicans have a knack for getting their own terrible commissioners quickly confirmed, while center-right Democrats (like Joe Manchin) help Republicans delay and destroy the nomination of actual, popular reformers that work in the public interest (recall what happened to Gigi Sohn’s appointment to the FCC) via circular firing squad.

Some of the Democrats whining because Carr has failed to seat new Dem Commissioners contributed to that railroading of Sohn, I should point out. So it’s hard to believe these same Dems will respond to Trump and Carr’s illegal appointment blockade with much beyond a stern talking to and ambiguous calls for a return to “bipartisanship.”

Here, as with everywhere else, the Democratic party is in desperate need of a meaningful rebuild.

Filed Under: anna gomez, brendan carr, danielle severs, deregulation, fcc, media, telecom