from the Schrödinger’s-regulator dept

FCC boss Brendan Carr was dragged before Congress this week for some light questioning about his repeated, often-illegal abuses of FCC power. It was the first time the FCC has had to appear before Congress in five years, and the questioning, unsurprisingly, mostly dealt with Carr’s failed attempts to censor comedian Jimmy Kimmel for making jokes the thin-skinned president didn’t like.

As you might expect, Carr smugly refused to take any real ownership of his repeated abuses of power, whether we’re talking about his abuse of the FCC merger review process to ensure companies kiss Donald Trump’s ass, his attacks on public media, his destruction of FCC consumer protection standards, or his repeated efforts to leverage the FCC to censor journalists and comedians critical of the country’s increasingly unpopular authoritarian leadership.

But most of the day got hung up on a very simple question: is the FCC an independent agency, or is it dutifully bound to obediently do whatever the president wants without question? If you’re new to this, the answer is supposed to be the former, but Carr, ever the dutiful Donald Trump earlobe nibbler, really struggled with this line of questioning all day long:

This was apparently such a sensitive line of questioning for Carr and the Trump FCC that it actively changed its website during Carr’s testimony to falsely state the agency was no longer independent:

Just so people understand: Carr has always been shameless liar and opportunist, whose underpinning legal and “intellectual” logic for what he’s doing will just randomly change, at whim, to justify his actions. Republicans, and a lot of our press, will then work tirelessly to normalize this as serious adult policymaking.

Something important to note that highlights Carr’s hypocrisy: back during the net neutrality wars in 2014, Barack Obama publicly stated that he supported imposing some basic rules, which was perfectly normal and legal. At the time, Republicans positively freaked out, insisting that the president’s vocal support was among the greatest indignities ever conceived and violated FCC independence.

That included Brendan Carr, who just last year was still pushing the lie that Obama’s support for net neutrality was some how a great affront to the balance of power among the branches:

“President Obama’s one minute and 57 second video was the culmination of an unprecedented and coordinated effort by the Executive Branch to pressure an independent agency into grabbing power that the Legislative Branch never said it had delegated.”

That FCC independence had been somehow destroyed because Obama legally vocally supported net neutrality has been a central talking point for Republicans for years now. It was the centerpiece of phony Republican congressional inquiries and reports for the better part of a decade.

Yet here you have a Republican president openly ordering the FCC to censor critics, journalists, and entertainers. And Carr, shamelessly trying to now claim the FCC serves entirely at the whim of the president:

This is who Carr is (and who modern Republicans are). For decades they’ve wanted to have their cake and eat it too. When it’s time to implement even modest oversight of predatory telecom monopolies or media giants, folks like Carr will insist the FCC is just a helpless puppy with no authority. When it comes time to offload TikTok to Trump’s billionaire friends, censor journalists critical of their mad king, or bully comedians, suddenly the FCC has all the authority in the world.

The disconnect is jarring. With one hand, Trumplicans are working tirelessly to dismantle all corporate oversight and regulatory independence to the benefit of a handful of billionaires and giant corporations. With their other hand, they’re trying to pretend that these agencies have all the power in the world to engage in ham-fisted authoritarian bullshit, censorship, corruption, and cronyism.

There’s absolutely zero legal coherence to any of it. It’s kakistocracy. It’s authoritarianism at the hands of the dimmest, least ethical people imaginable. It’s frequently illegal. And it’s embarrassing.

One downside of the day’s focus on FCC independence is that Congress didn’t really pressure Carr on any of the other ethically problematic and illegal things he’s been doing, whether it’s a fake “investigation” into public media, his abuses of the merger approval process to require that companies be more sexist and racist, or his complete decimation of FCC consumer protection and media consolidation limits.

Filed Under: brendan carr, censorship, donald trump, fcc, free speech, independence, liars, media, regulators, telecom