Corporate-Friendly Democrats Are Standing in the Way of Reviving Net Neutrality
The fight to keep the FCC from killing net neutrality isn't over yet. Last December, in a party-line vote, the FCC reversed the 2015 policy that keeps Internet service providers from picking and choosing who gets faster access, more traffic, and for how much money. California is currently working to impose its own state-wide net neutrality laws, but a major push in Congress is currently under way also.
The Congressional Review Act could allow Congress to undo that decision. It takes a relatively low threshold in the Senate—only 30 signatures, well shy of a majority—to call a vote. But it's a steeper climb in the House, where 218 signatures are needed. Only 38 more signatures are needed to hit that threshold, but that could be cut almost in half if the last 17 holdout Democrats in the House would add their names. Unfortunately, those 17 Democrats have all taken gobs of money from Internet service providers.
Ordinarily, the deadline to try to implement the CRA would have already passed, but as Gizmodo reports, the protracted budget fight effectively extends that deadline to December 21, so there's still time to get the last signatures needed. The advocacy group Fight for the Future has compiled the names of the Democrat holdouts and how much cash each has received from the industry at demsagainstthe.net, but some of them have already staked out their opposition. Per Gizmodo:
Activists marked Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, a Democrat of Pennsylvania, who was sworn in less than a month ago, as a particularly egregious case. In a Facebook video this week, Scanlon acknowledged having received numerous calls from constituents, but claimed she was refusing to sign on to the CRA because it is, she said, “an arcane congressional maneuver.” (The Congressional Review Act was enacted in 1996.)
As Gizmodo points out, the second largest contributor to Scanlon's campaign was Comcast, and a now-deleted section of her campaign website repeated industry talking points that net neutrality should only be mandated by congressional legislation, despite the fact that the FCC is empowered by Congress to enact administrative laws. So she's taking both money and tortured logic from the Internet service providers who will reap massive benefits from the death of net neutrality.
Across the country, net neutrality enjoys broad support among both Democrat and Republican voters. Many Americans live in a place where they only have access to one Internet service provider, and 100 million people only have access to providers who have already violated net neutrality rules, according to Motherboard. And while the FCC boasted millions of public comments supporting the rollback of net neutrality, an estimated 9.5 million of those were fake.
Democrats often try to portray themselves as the sensible alternative to the Republicans, a party fully dedicated to enhancing the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful. But that message gets undercut often by the Democrats themselves, who in most cases are only marginally less pro-corporation than the Republicans. Their track record of siding with the rich over the middle class is part of what led former Republican commentator Kevin Phillips to call them "history's second-most enthusiastic capitalist party," second only to the GOP. As long as there are Democrats who try to have it both ways, trying to prioritize their corporate sponsors and their voters at the same time, they'll never be anything but a bloodless copy of the Republicans.
