[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 157 (Monday, October 2, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6239-S6240]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                        Las Vegas Mass Shooting

  Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, before my planned remarks on the Federal 
Communications Commission, I want to say a few words about the awful 
events that happened in Las Vegas. Our hearts are with the families 
affected by the tragedy and with the city of Las Vegas, and we do send 
them our best wishes and our prayers. But we can do more than send our 
thoughts and prayers to the grieving. We can do more than thank the 
first responders. We can do more than lower the flag to half mast.
  We can take a stand against gun violence by passing commonsense gun 
safety laws. Otherwise, this becomes a ritual of mass murder, mourning, 
and moving on. Let's stop this awful ritual. Let's stop the violence. 
Let's do something about it.
  Mr. President, I wish to talk about the nomination of Chairman Ajit 
Pai to lead the Federal Communications Commission for another 5 years. 
When it comes to Chairman Pai, personally and professionally, I want to 
say that I believe in his integrity as a public servant, and I believe 
he is smart and qualified. But the FCC is supposed to create 
competition and protect consumers, and Chairman Pai isn't doing that.
  First, Chairman Pai's FCC is trying to get rid of net neutrality. Net 
neutrality is a Federal rule that says ISPs--internet service 
providers--must treat all content equally. They can't discriminate by 
making certain kinds of content slower, charging more for other kinds 
of content, or blocking some content altogether.
  That is the basic premise of the internet. Once you pay for your 
broadband internet access and then you jump on a browser, everything 
comes down to the same speeds. It is so foundational to the way we use 
the internet that it is actually hard to describe a future without net 
neutrality, but it could be that you pay your ISP, and certain websites 
download fast.
  Certain websites are almost impossible to find. For certain websites, 
you have to pay a premium just to be able to capture their content. 
Forget what you may have to pay Hulu, Netflix, and others. The ISP will 
essentially control your access to the internet. That is why net 
neutrality was so important. It is not that, in that moment, things 
were necessarily undermining the current internet but that, without a 
firm rule, these companies may have incentives to change the internet 
as we know it.

  When Chairman Pai announced that the FCC would review the rules on 
net neutrality, he said: ``This is a fight we intend to wage, and it is 
a fight that we are going to win.'' But that is not how the FCC is 
supposed to work. This is a quasi-judicial agency. They are supposed to 
propose a rule, allow the public to weigh in, and then the agency 
considers the comments before making a decision. Chairman Pai had made 
it clear from the beginning that he had already made up his mind. Even 
though there were 22 million individual comments from American citizens 
about what we should do with the free and open internet, he had decided 
in advance of that.
  Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern. Right after Congress took 
away the FCC's ability to protect people's privacy online, he wrote an 
op-ed that essentially read that this is good news. It is pretty 
unusual to have a chairman of a quasi-judicial body weigh in on 
something that the legislative branch does or to completely disregard 
the process for public input. Chairman Pai has not yet demonstrated a 
willingness to stray from the party line.
  One of the things I like about him is that I know that he has a big 
brain. We have talked policy, and when we have had private 
conversations, I have seen that he has liked the engagement, that he 
likes the job, and that he likes public service. The challenge is that 
there has been no instance in which he has done anything that was other 
than predictably Republican. That is OK for now, as it has been a 
relatively short tenure, but what we need in an FCC Chairman is someone 
who takes his own views and the facts, as the record becomes 
established, and makes up his own mind. He is not a Republican while he 
is on the FCC. His job is to apply the facts and his own judgment.
  During the confirmation hearing, I asked him about the President of 
the United States calling the media the ``enemy of the state.'' He 
would not say one way or another what he thought of those comments or 
how he would guide the FCC based on those comments. At some point, he 
needs to demonstrate some independence from his party and from the 
President.
  With this vote, the Senate has a chance to say that the person who 
leads the FCC should understand, at a bare minimum, how to run a quasi-
judicial agency in a nonpartisan fashion,

[[Page S6240]]

that he or she should value public input, and that he or she should not 
simply go along with what the party is asking and implement it no 
matter how it stacks up against the statute.
  Here is another example. Earlier this year, Chairman Pai rolled back 
a rule in order to allow local TV stations to be bought up without any 
limits by one single company. This decision seemed to be for the 
benefit of one company, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which just 
happens to be a company with strong conservative leanings. Sinclair is 
already the largest owner of local broadcasting stations in the United 
States, but now it is trying to buy another company, Tribune Media, 
which would expand Sinclair's reach into 72 percent of the households.
  For decades, both Congress and the FCC have taken steps to protect 
local broadcasting because it has benefited the public interest. So, 
under normal circumstances, Sinclair would not be able to buy up these 
other stations, but Chairman Pai has changed the rules so that this 
company will have even more power and reach. The secondary beneficiary 
of this change will be the Republican Party, because Sinclair has a 
decades-long history of pressuring its local stations to broadcast 
certain news that helps the Republican cause.
  We need an independent Chairman at the helm of the FCC. We need 
someone who will make decisions based on statute, not based on 
political affiliation. That is why I will vote no on Mr. Pai's 
nomination, but I hope that I will be proven wrong.
  I yield the floor.