Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise in support of my resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act of the FCC's broadband privacy restrictions. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Privacy Subcommittee, I have spent more than a year closely examining this issue. In February of 2015 the FCC, under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler, took the unprecedented step of reclassifying broadband providers as ``common carriers'' under title II of the Communications Act. In other words, on a 3-to-2 party-line vote, the FCC decided that internet service providers should be treated like telephone companies for regulatory purposes. The decision encroached on the Federal Trade Commission's jurisdiction to regulate ISP privacy policies, stripping these companies of their traditional privacy regulator. Recognizing that his actions to impose net neutrality on ISPs created regulatory uncertainty, last spring Chairman Wheeler began to float the idea of implementing new FCC privacy rules. The FCC decided, again on a 3-to-2 party-line vote, to move forward with the rule change just before election day. The whole process was unsettling, to say the least. The FCC ultimately decided to commandeer an area of regulatory authority for itself, without any meaningful check on this unilateral action. Once it initiated the bureaucratic power grab, it proceeded to establish new rules restricting the free speech of its regulatory target.…”