Pai FCC Divided Along Party Lines
When he was an FCC commissioner, now-Chairman Ajit Pai frequently criticized then-Chairman Tom Wheeler for overseeing an FCC divided along party lines. With Pai nearing one year in charge, his commission appears to have a similar partisan divide to the preceding one, found a review for this Special Report of all commissioners' meeting votes under both leaders in their first year or so. Not all interviewed for this article agree partisanship continues unabated under Pai, although all agree it's increased from the distant past. And when all and not just meeting votes are included, Pai does fare better.
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The partisan divide is clear on the bigger issues, agree current and former agency officials. An eighth-floor Democratic official said that “you can slice the vote count however you like,” but the divide is big. Based on rhetoric, party divisions under Wheeler and then Pai are much starker than at previous FCCs, a former official said.
A count of commissioners’ meeting votes under Pai shows that vote counts split with all the possible Republican votes on one side and all the possible Democrat votes on the other side 10 times. During 2014, Wheeler’s first year in office, that happened 11 times on meeting votes. Pai still has two meetings left in the year expected to include divisive items, and a count of meeting votes excludes items approved on circulation, but attorneys who follow the commission agreed the Pai FCC seems split along party divisions in roughly the same manner the previous commission. Pai’s meeting items during his 10 months were split along party lines 16 percent of the time, compared with 30 percent during Wheeler’s entire reign, a spokesman said. Wheeler didn’t comment.
Comparison is difficult because Pai’s FCC voted many more items in meetings in his near-year in office than the Wheeler FCC did in the same time frame, as detailed also in another article in this Special Report (see 1711050001). “Compared to his predecessor, Chairman Pai has voted almost twice the number of meeting items, with 84 percent of them voted along bipartisan lines,” a spokesman said. Though some of the meeting votes were huge issues like the UHF discount, a large number are widely seen as minor matters that weren’t controversial, such as a recent vote on removing a rule requiring broadcasters and MVPDs to keep hard copies of rules on hand. When the FCC had only three commissioners, the Pai FCC also had to shift controversial items to meetings to avoid the possibility of votes being blocked under procedural rules that require three commissioner votes to trigger “must-vote” on an item (see 1703100056). Pai also greatly reduced the practice of approving items on delegated authority. “No matter how you crunch the numbers, Chairman Pai’s record is proof positive that the FCC is moving on all cylinders to bridge the digital divide on behalf of Americans,” the spokesman said.
The regulatory partisan split seems to mirror that among lawmakers, some said. The division “runs in parallel” to similar ones on Capitol Hill, said Penn State telecom law professor Robert Frieden. “Just look at the number of votes that cleave on a Democratic-Republican fulcrum.” In the past, telecom issues weren’t considered to break along party lines, he said. “With the overall climate in D.C., it’s pretty hard to play the middle,” said Mediacom Senior Vice President-Legal and Public Affairs Tom Larsen.
Despite the party-line votes, Pai’s FCC may be more open to compromise than the agency had been, said a longtime broadcast lawyer. Pai touts the value of bipartisan compromise, yet in meeting remarks, opposition commissioners mentioned having suggestions for changes to draft items rejected. In previous FCCs, the majority might not have listened to such suggestions at all, the attorney said. Recently, statements from FCC Democrats condemning majority actions on items such approving Securus' sale (see 1710300065) indicate a sharp divide, lawyers said.
The FCC is constructed by statute to be split along party lines, with party membership determining makeup, said Danilo Yanich, associate professor at the University of Delaware School of Public Policy and Administration. Such conflicts are “part of the FCC’s design," he said. “There’s no way to get around that.”