Slashdot Mirror
House Overturns FCC Media Consolidation Plan
son_of_a_general writes "Looks like the House of Representatives just overturned the FCC's media consolidation rules, previously covered on Slashdot here(1), here(2), and here(3). The article over at CNet shows that the House passed a bill that overturned the rules, by a 400 to 21 vote. All is not clear yet, however, as the bill still must pass through Senate and face being signed by a President who has already indicated that he may veto."
The article says that they only rejected funding for FCC programs that allow consolidation of this type... a slight difference
"Rejected funding" is really just a code word for using a budget bill to eliminate something mostly unrelated to the allocation of specific amounts of government funds. The effect of this bill is that the FCC cannot spend even one dollar of government money to implement their plan, but rules that are already in place say that things like the FCC's plan cannot be privately funded. Therefore, they have $0 to implement the plan. Thus, the plan is void and will be replaced with whatever plan the funding has been allocated to (in this case, the old FCC rules before the recent change).
It's the same effect as making a gun legal, but outlawing the specific ammo for it. Sure, you can legally own and use the gun, but if they've banned its ammo, then they've effectively banned the gun. If you're hellbent on owning a projectile weapon, then you'll have to buy whichever one you can legally buy ammunition for.
And yes, as I'm sure you're thinking, politicians really DO play some damned stupid games. The mating rituals of various brightly colored birds and amphibians are simple and logical by comparison.
A veto override requires passage of the bill a second time by both houses of Congress, each with a 2/3 majority. See Article I, Section 7 of the US Constitution.
Much of this is froufrou. While I take some sort of glee in the fact that the *partial* rollback measure was attached as a "rider" to a spending bill - just like how Congress screwed LPFM back in 2000 - similar legislation must still be passed by the Senate, and then survive a conference committee, a veto, AND an override, in order to actually happen.
Symbolically, this is a very good thing (as well as being somewhat historic in a political sense), but in the real world it will likely get axed in the dead of night by the real string-pullers in Congress, and what the FCC did will stay in place.
That is why just ignoring the FCC to begin with makes for more fun. (viva microradio!)
Seriously tho, if you want the scoop on the politics you can get near-daily updates from media reform lobbyists working the Hill. I don't know if they keep archives of their reports, but I do remember seeing that more than this rider was in play at one time. One other proposed amendment (sunk before getting to the floor, I believe) would've rolled back most if not all of the FCC's changes, but the one that made the cut was the weakest of the bunch.