(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Gigi Sohn Withdraws from Nomination for the FCC [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-03-10 This just makes me angry. The FCC has been split 2:2 for some time and Sohn has been through a 16-month odyssey where she was subjected to attack after attack. Craig Aaron, in an email titled “The Bullies Won,” reviewed the blame for the current situation, and came up with a delay in nominating her, an unprecedented three hearings where she was viciously attacked by the right wing, lack of united Democratic support while she was under attack, lack of sufficient White House/Senate leadership pressure, as well as White House support for internet service provider execs at a Rose Garden meeting at the same time as they were attacking Sohn. Aaron described a little bit of what this dedicated public servant had to endure: Senate leaders made Sohn endure an unprecedented three confirmation hearings, giving the right-wing noise machine numerous opportunities to badger her while extracting zero concessions from the other side. Despite her composure in the hot seat, this stage let Sohn’s opponents test out numerous lines of attack. Sen. Ted Cruz got endless opportunities to condemn her random retweets while Sen. J.D. Vance cosplayed as a culture warrior from his new perch on the Commerce Committee. Robert Kuttner plays up the betrayal aspect: Blocked by several Democratic senators who succumbed to a fierce lobbying campaign by Big Telecom and Big Tech, Gigi Sohn withdrew her nomination to be the tie-breaking commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission. This loss leaves the FCC deadlocked, with two Republicans and two Democrats. I feel this. I really do. The FCC is important and becoming even more so as electronic communications come to dominate what is supposed to be out democratic discourse and play a disproportionate role in the economy. The Democrats need more public interest advocates of the sort that Biden has been good at nominating. The FCC needs a majority of public interest advocates like Sohn to overcome what now amounts to decades worth of degradation in the US’ democratic discourse under conditions of media concentration and oligarchical control and dominance of new forms of media. Kuttner mentioned some of Sohn’s strengths as a nominee: Sohn was long a champion of net neutrality. Her sin was to be too vigorous and too well-informed an advocate of the public interest in telecom policy. She also would have been the first LGBTQ commissioner of the FCC, which made her the target of a whispering hate campaign. My feeling is that this reflects well thoughts I have been having since 2003-4ish, when it was becoming clear to me that the current party system has failed to the extent that it has been looking like the collapse of the Whigs for a long time. The Whigs had no answer to the question of the day (slavery), and their implosion was swift when it came. The Republicans have no answer to climate change or inequality and I fully expected there to be some sort of realignment long before now. Initially I had assumed that business conservatives would reassert themselves in the Republican Party, but the rapid Bush and Obama era defections of Republicans led me to think the Republicans would implode and the Democrats would split, especially with the rise of progressives within the Party. Well, I was wrong. It seems the Republicans have been able to gerrymander, suppress votes, shave votes, and flog prejudices combined with some very sophisticated propaganda to staple together a coalition to stumble across the finish line to advance and front for some of the most retrograde economic interests. I find this incredibly frustrating, as the Democratic Party has gone way beyond the big tent to encompassing most of the US political spectrum. Where the 2016 Republican primary had so many candidates saying the same thing that they could not fit them on one stage. In contrast, the 2016 Democratic primary started with a former conservative Republican member of Reagan’s cabinet, a recent former liberal Republican, a moderate Democrat, a liberal corporate Democrat, a single-issue good-government academic, and an independent socialist. The final division in both 2008 and 2016 more of less mirrored the general election politics of most major industrial nations where there is a more business establishment-leaning party and a more outsider/left/labor-leaning party. In many countries, the conservatives look a lot more like the mainstream of the Democratic Party than they look like anything among US “conservatives” who have gone off the deep reactionary end of the pool. The competition between the different camps of Democrats is productive, producing different answers to the questions of the day, but they both produce answers. The reason I bring this up now is that there is a camp of business-oriented Democrats who cannot come out into the open all the time, but who sabotage the things that will catapult the Democratic Party back into clear majority status. It is not always clear who they are, because it does not take that many people to shut down legislation with the close divide. Kuttner reminds us: Joe Manchin was the most public of Sohn’s adversaries, having issued a statement Tuesday saying that "the commission must remain above the toxic partisanship that Americans are sick and tired of, and Ms. Sohn has clearly shown that she is not the person to do that." He also mentions others And reporting by the Daily Dot revealed that two other senators, Mark Kelly of Arizona and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, equivocated on their support. Both were just re-elected, so this is entirely about sucking up to Big Tech and not about home-state political risks. Three other senators who are up for re-election in 2024, Sens. Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Jon Tester of Montana, reportedly didn’t want the nomination reported out of committee unless they had assurances that the full Senate would vote to confirm. I support all of these people, depending on contest. They vote for a Democratic Senate majority, vote for Democratic judges, etc. However, they happily cleave off from the Party to join Republican opposition to shoot down popular Democratic initiatives like the minimum wage, Build Back Better, etc., so that the electorate is left with a frustrating choice of voting Republican and getting Republican crazy or voting Democratic and seeing Democrats lining up with Republicans to shoot down or water down the most popular priorities the Party has to offer. It is hard watching Democrats we depend on spinning their heads looking for excuses to shoot down popular initiatives. I am not sure how this is productive or answers any of our major issues. It is even harder when they line up with Republican interests to shoot down the kind of ideal public servant who should be staffing all of our government like Gigi Sohn. Biden has been great and easily well exceeded my expectations, but I hope the Administration can turn around a quick nomination and get it through without letting a good public servant suffer twisting in the wind. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/10/2157232/-Gigi-Sohn-Withdraws-from-Nomination-for-the-FCC Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/