Executive Calendar, Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, I want to thank the senior Senator from Texas for his leadership in the disaster response, and I pledge my commitment to whatever is needed for Houston and the areas around Houston, as well as Florida. I appreciate the commitment at the legislative level for what needs to be done in Puerto Rico.

Mr. President, we also need to continue to apply pressure to the administration because it does appear as though there is an unequal response between what is happening in Puerto Rico and what has happened in Houston and in Florida. So we need to hold as a country the executive branch accountable for the lack of a sense of urgency for 3.5 million Americans who are mostly going to be without power for 9 months, who are currently without potable water, who are in a devastated situation. It is our obligation to do everything we can.
Mr. President, the Senate is about to make an important decision about who leads the Federal agency that oversees everything from the internet, to the TV, to radio.

This vote is a choice: We can either give our stamp of approval on the FCC's direction under the leadership of Chairman Pai, or we can decide that his leadership has put the FCC on the wrong track and that it is time for someone else to take charge.

Generally speaking, here is how I approach a nomination. There are three reasons one might reject a nominee. If the person is corrupt, it is a nonstarter. If the person is nonqualified, it is also a nonstarter. And even on policy grounds, in the policy space, just disagreeing with someone can often boil down to the fact that there is a President from another party and is not sufficient to vote no.

Chairman Pai is someone I know. He is skillful, he is a decent human being, he is very smart, and he is qualified. When we disagree, we can do it in a way that doesn't ruin our ability to work together on the following day on the following issue. And this is no small thing in today's political climate. So it is important that if we are ever going to get something done, we are able to disagree and find common ground afterward.
I do like Chairman Pai as a person. I think he is ethical and he is capable. But he is just so wrong on policy.

For me, that means he is not the right leader for the FCC. I want to highlight four of the concerns I have.
First, the FCC really is trying to end the internet as we know it by getting rid of net neutrality. If they succeed, your internet service provider will have the power to stop you from seeing certain kinds of content. They will be the ones that make decisions about what you can access online and how fast and how much you have to pay for it.

Some people say that companies aren't going to change the internet because it is not in their interest to change the internet, even if the law goes away. But think about this: Most often, these ISPs are publicly traded companies, and they are going to make decisions based on their own financial interests. It is not just an objective; it is their obligation. If there is an opportunity to change their business model for internet service, they are duty bound to pursue it. They do not have any obligation to a free and open internet; they have an obligation to shareholders and to profits.

That is why net neutrality exists in the first place--because we should not leave it up to any company to decide whether they are going to charge people more to stream video, for example, or block certain content altogether. If we allow the FCC to end net neutrality, Americans across the country are going to find that the internet no longer works in the way that it should. And this has happened under Chairman Pai's leadership.
It is not just bad policy that he is pursuing; they have also had some serious process fouls. When Chairman Pai announced that the FCC was revisiting the rules, he made clear that the FCC was going to get rid of net neutrality regardless of what happened throughout the process. He said: ``This is a fight we intend to wage and it is a fight we intend to win.'' Why is that a significant thing to say? ``This is a fight we intend to wage and it is a fight we intend to win.'' This a quasi-judicial agency. They just opened up a public comment period.
There were 22 million members of the public who submitted public comments after the Chairman of the Commission has already announced that he has decided which way they are going to go. I think that is antithetical to the governing statute, and it is antithetical to the basic premise that if you have an open comment period where an individual has an opportunity to express themselves, you have to listen to them. You don't say: I already decided, but you 22 million people-- if you have an opinion, I will be happy to receive it and file it and do what I planned to do all along. That is the exact opposite of how this is supposed to work.
The agency proposes the rule, the public weighs in, and then the agency considers the comments from the public in making the decision.

But Chairman Pai turned it upside down. The FCC has tried to diminish the fact that so many people tried to weigh in. About 96 percent of the roughly 22 million people who have weighed in have weighed in in favor of net neutrality. They are trying to lay the groundwork to get rid of net neutrality even though the vast majority of people are for it. By doing that, the FCC is effectively saying that lobbyists and law firms matter more than regular citizens.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The FCC has claimed that cyber attacks kept people from being able to comment, but they have not been forthcoming about what exactly happened, and we are still working in our oversight role to figure that all out.

Secondly, I would like to address media ownership. Local TV broadcasters are an essential part of every community. People know their local TV station. They trust it. There is a range of perspectives offered. Because the broadcasters are based in the community, they have relationships with their viewers that make their content better and more relevant.

For decades, Congress and the FCC have taken steps to keep local broadcasting local because it benefits the public interest. These are the public airways. It is like fast food options across the country.

You may not mind McDonald's once in a while, but you don't want that to be the only option in your hometown. You want something that captures the local culture in your community. That is what local broadcasting does. It makes TV in Honolulu different from TV in Hartford or Houston.

But now the American tradition of local broadcasting is in real danger because the FCC is going to change the rules so that these stations can be bought out by a single company without any limits. I have no doubt this would create a world of sort of nationalized content distributed through each of these local companies, with consumers having to watch whatever is distributed to them by their national headquarters. This is no longer local news, and this is not the broadcast media that Americans deserve.

The third area I want to talk about is broadband access. Right now, Americans have widely different levels of internet speed basically based on where they live. In some places, you have great broadband access, no trouble streaming video, accessing government services online, downloading, uploading, but in rural and Tribal communities, they are very, very far behind. As the FCC noted, 39 percent of rural America and 41 percent of those on Tribal land lack access to advanced broadband. Even if they have cell phones with internet access, a mobile network will typically offer slower speed than fixed broadband, so they can't go online and do the things we can in Washington, DC, or in many other cities across the country. So everyone, on a bipartisan basis, understands that this needs to change.

High-speed broadband is the cornerstone to economic development, public safety, and quality of life in every community, no matter how many people live in your community. The FCC has historically worked so that every home, school, and business has had adequate access to the internet because that is what it will take to unlock the innovation and potential for all Americans.

The FCC has worked on this issue by setting the bar for what it will take to connect more Americans to the internet. There is already a threshold in place which says that this is what high-speed internet access is, so we know who has it and who doesn't. But instead of actually working to get more people broadband, the FCC is working to change the definition of broadband so that it looks as if they have gotten people more broadband. That way they can say that more Americans are covered, even if they have internet service that does not meet their needs. In other words, they are not actually solving the problem; they are literally just redefining what it means to have access. Rather than giving people access, they are papering over the problem that they are not solving. This is a real issue, and it is something that the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee members have worked on on a bipartisan basis.

The way to get more people broadband access is to get more people broadband access. It is not to change the rules and to change the metrics so that you can come back to the Congress and say: Look, we just achieved more access by allowing these companies to claim that people are covered who are not.
The fourth and final concern I want to raise is a little more sensitive because, as I said, I like Chairman Pai, and I respect Chairman Pai, but he made some comments during his confirmation hearing that worried me. I asked if he agreed with the President's comments calling the media the enemy of the state. He would not give a direct answer.

I understand that Mr. Pai is a Republican. That is not the problem. I understand Republicans will be appointed in a Republican administration. I am the former Democratic Party chairman of the State of Hawaii, so I understand party loyalty. I respect party loyalty.

We have a President and a White House that are pushing to blur the legal, moral, and ethical boundaries in our Nation's Capital. This is not the time to get cute when we ask a question about the rule of law.

This is not the time to finesse an answer. The only acceptable answer is this: I will not let anyone interfere with my work, whether it is the President or anyone else, and the media is not the enemy of the state. Mr. Pai did not take that opportunity. This was one of a few opportunities Mr. Pai had to be unequivocal. The senior Senator from New Mexico, if I remember correctly, and other members of the panel, sort of gave him a second and third bite at the apple so that he could get it right. It was an easy one to get right. I understand it is politically complicated, but sometimes you have to set aside the politics and just say what is right and do what is right.

My instinct is that he will not use the FCC to do anything that crosses any ethical boundaries that I am worried about, but the fact that he will not say so leaves an opening that should not be there.

The President has tweeted about media companies that give him bad coverage. He consistently refers to the media as ``fake news'' media and ``garbage'' media and makes unsubstantiated claims about various networks and newspapers and threatens to come after them. So it is not out of the realm of possibility that this could go beyond some partisan talking point from the Democrats in the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and into a real crisis.

I just want to hear from Mr. Pai. He will be confirmed on Monday, but I want to hear from Mr. Pai that he does not believe the media is the enemy of the state and he will not allow any interference from the White House.
I would like to end by bringing this back to the American people.

This vote is our chance to stand up for them. There will not be a vote on net neutrality on the floor in the next weeks or months, but they deserve to keep their faith in local broadcasting, they deserve a free and open internet, and they deserve to have adequate access to the internet no matter where they live. That is why I have to vote no on this nominee.

I admire Chairman Pai. I like him as a person, but he is the wrong leader for the FCC. I urge my colleagues to join me and vote no on his nomination.

I yield the floor.

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