(Credit: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
A Thursday Senate hearing seems to have forced a Federal Communications Commission staffer to lurch for their keyboard and edit the commission’s site to delete a word now out of favor with FCC Chair Brendan Carr: Independent.
The proximate cause was an exchange about 1.5 hours into a Senate Commerce oversight hearing, when Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) asked Carr: "Please, yes or no, is the FCC an independent agency?"
After a testy back and forth, with Carr citing the commission’s establishing legislation and Luján demanding a yes-or-no reply, the senator pointed to the commission's "About the FCC" page, which described it as "An independent US government agency overseen by Congress."
Sen. Luján interjected: “It just simply says, man, the FCC's independent,” asking moments later: “Is your website lying?”
Carr: “Possibly.”
Carr reiterated that “the FCC is not an independent agency, formally speaking.” His fellow Republican appointee, Olivia Trusty, supported him, saying, “We do not have for-cause removal protections, which means that we aren’t independent.”
Sen. Luján concluded by saying, “If this is lying, then you should just fix it,” and had a printout of the FCC page entered into the hearing record.
Anna Gomez, the sole Democratic appointee on what’s supposed to be a five-member commission, then agreed with the senator about the agency's independence. “Yes, and we should be," she told him.
Axios media reporter Sara Fischer had the situational awareness to screengrab that page at 11:52 a.m. ET, several minutes after that exchange. Twenty-five minutes later, somebody had edited it to describe the FCC as “A US government agency overseen by Congress.”
“This is INSANE," Fischer tweeted.
The old language lives on in Internet Archive captures of that page running from January 2016 to early October.
The underlying debate is about much more than content management practices at the FCC. Prior to President Trump’s second inauguration, FCC chairs from both parties emphasized their independence, and few FCC observers questioned that.
The Communications Act of 1934, the FCC’s founding legislation, does not directly describe the commission as independent but does limit any political party’s representation on it to the minimum needed for a voting majority, sets five-year terms for commissioners, and limits how long anyone can serve after the expiration of their term. In March, Sens. Luján and Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced a bill that would codify the FCC’s independence.
When President Obama asked the FCC to pass strict net-neutrality regulations in November 2014, Republicans denounced that as a grotesque form of Executive Branch overreach.
Just last April, Carr agreed with those denunciations. When a Democratic-led FCC voted to reinstate net-neutrality rules, Carr, then a GOP commissioner, disagreed at length in a statement that called Obama’s YouTube endorsement of net-neutrality rules “the culmination of an unprecedented and coordinated effort by the Executive Branch to pressure an independent agency.”
This February, however, Trump issued an executive order declaring that he alone controls the FCC and other agencies traditionally regarded as independent, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Trump has since fired the FTC’s two Democratic members, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter. Carr has repeatedly declared his loyalty to Trump and engaged in an unprecedented campaign to punish broadcasters for perceived unfairness to his boss—up to his clumsy attempt to get ABC to fire late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel, the sort of thing Carr previously decried as government censorship.
The Supreme Court is now hearing a challenge to Trump’s firing of Slaughter, and its December hearings suggested it will once again rule in this president’s favor. This would allow a future Democratic president to fire Carr in their inaugural address, which we suppose Carr would then denounce as grotesque Executive Branch overreach.