Walden Eyes Next Steps on Moving FCC Reauthorization in House
House lawmakers aren't ready to announce clear plans forward on FCC reauthorization legislation following the Senate Commerce Committee's unanimous approval of its bipartisan two-year FCC Reauthorization Act (S-2644) last week (see 1604270055). A senior House Republican told us no firm decisions are made nor a course set for House action, despite interest in reauthorizing the agency for the first time since 1990.
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“I’m pleased that the Senate’s moving legislation,” said House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. “I commend them for it. We’ll look forward to getting it over here, and then we’ll discuss where we go from there. Because we don’t have many legislative days.”
Walden was aware of details of the Senate’s FCC reauthorization legislation, which includes other proposals such as Kari’s Law Act (S-2553) that House Commerce Committee lawmakers have taken an interest in. House Commerce unanimously approved its Kari’s Law Act companion (HR-4167) during a Thursday markup. Walden didn’t say whether he would want to add such legislation to an FCC reauthorization effort, instead saying the focus for him and his staff was on the nine telecom bills the full House Commerce Committee approved last week. “I think the next discussion that we’re going to have internally is, where do we go from here?” Walden said on the question of whether to include such bills in an FCC reauthorization vehicle, as in the case of the Kari's Law Act in the Senate.
The Senate isn’t likely to immediately send over S-2644 and prompt the talk Walden predicted. “We’ll have to report it out, do the paperwork, the filing that’s required,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters after his committee’s approval of S-2644. Thune predicted an attempt to clear that measure from the full Senate by a unanimous consent hotline process before the end of May. There is also unresolved concern about a Senate spectrum amendment that was included. Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who judged S-2644 clean and wants it to stay uncontroversial, became an official co-sponsor of the bill last week. Both chambers of Congress are in recess this week and scheduled to return next week.
If House Republicans follow the path of the Senate bill, then House Democrats may see the effort as perfectly acceptable, a Democratic House staffer told us. The threshold question would involve funding, the staffer said, saying Democrats would also watch for any controversial partisan elements and wouldn't accept provisions they don't support. Democrats themselves are unlikely to press for the effort, nor does FCC reauthorization seem to be a priority among industry stakeholders, but there’s no inherent Democratic opposition to such legislation, the staffer explained.
“We haven’t made those decisions,” Walden said of whether House Republicans would want to craft their own FCC reauthorization bill or take up Thune’s S-2644 as the base text. He also refrained from expressing any stance on how broad or narrow he may intend a reauthorization measure to be: “I’m not ready to comment on that.” In March 2015, Walden released a five-year draft FCC reauthorization bill that unsettled some stakeholders due to provisions such as capping the USF at $9 billion annually. He and his staffers haven't mentioned that proposal much since its circulation more than a year ago. A GOP committee spokesman declined to expand upon Walden’s remarks or comment otherwise about FCC reauthorization plans.
This March Walden and GOP staff outlined hopes to move a reauthorization bill but offered no timeline then or now (see 1603280047). Senior House Republicans want FCC reauthorization in concept, Walden affirmed, including Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
“I still think, frankly, agencies within our jurisdiction should have to get reauthorized on a regular basis,” Walden told us. “By the way, we’re just doing that with the entire Department of Defense with NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act]. And they do it every year! I’d like to see all the authorizing committees, and I think the speaker would, too, get to the point where they all have to come up here and get reauthorized on a regular basis, whether that’s every year like NDAA or every five years or something. But I think that’s important to do for the process, for the public, for cost, for efficiencies, for accountability. So we’re having those discussions.”