Another day, another Barack Obama Administration totalitarian diktat.
In other words, whatever Obama wants – by any means necessary.
Behold Obama’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Which last week handed down from on-high a mandate that telecommunications companies AT&T, Verizon and Sprint MUST have Board votes on Network Neutrality.
SEC to Telcos: Yes, Net Neutrality is a Significant Policy Issue
The problem for Obama’s SEC is – Net Neutrality isn’t even a LEGAL policy issue. Because Congress has never passed a law making Net Neutrality actual policy.
The federal government – via the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – first tried to unilaterally impose Net Neutrality in 2008. And the D.C. Circuit Court in April 2010 unanimously threw the government out on its ear.
Because the FCC “has failed to tie its assertion” of regulatory authority to an actual law enacted by Congress, the agency does not have the power to regulate an Internet provider’s network management practices, wrote Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Tuesday’s decision could doom one of the signature initiatives of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a Democrat. Last October, Genachowski announced plans to begin drafting a formal set of Net neutrality rules–even though Congress has not given the agency permission to do so.
But it didn’t doom Genachowski and Obama’s illegal Net Neutrality intentions. It didn’t even daunt them. Just eight months after this stinging rebuke, Obama’s FCC went ahead and illegally jammed through Net Neutrality anyway.
They did so despite the D.C. Circuit Court’s unanimous ruling. And they did so despite the fact that more than 300 members of the then still-Democrat-Majority Congress – the body charged with giving the FCC Net Neutrality authority – were for months in advancetelling them not to.
—–
Verizon, MetroPCS and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli are all now suing to undo this particular Obama power grab. In the same D.C. Circuit Court that threw out the FCC’s first illegal attempt.
There are very few things judges and courts like less than summarily dispatching a case – and then again having to hear the same case. So the FCC’s Illegal Attempt II will most likely suffer the exact same fate as Illegal Attempt I.
The FCC has been all along hedging its Net Neutrality bet – by illegally jamming merging companies with Net Neutrality mandates as a condition of the government approving said mergers.
Which – on the 2010 Comcast-NBCU merger – even the uber-Leftist Washington Post thought was a bad idea:
FCC officials should resist calls by some merger opponents to impose “net neutrality” principles on Comcast’s Internet component.
Obama’s FCC – shocker – did it anyway.
(Why private companies that have reached mutually agreeable business arrangements must then seek government approval is one excellent question. Why the government can then illegally make up laws out of whole cloth and stick these companies with them as approval conditions is another.)
—–
So what Obama’s SEC is now doing on Net Neutrality is just and yet another illegal power play by Obama’s Administration.
Overrunning the private Board practices of private companies – and mandating they vote on something no government agency has any authority to impose.
Uber-Leftist policy – by any means necessary.