Gomez: FCC Can't Consider 'New and Novel Issues' Without Quorum
“No new or novel issues should be considered” by the FCC until it has a quorum, said Commissioner Anna Gomez at a webinar hosted Monday by the Free Press Foundation. The agency doesn’t have a quorum because both Commissioner Nathan Simington and Geoffrey Starks resigned Friday (see 2506060035). The event was the latest in Gomez’s “First Amendment Tour” of speaking engagements on the FCC's and White House’s policies against media organizations. “New and novel” includes controversial matters like the Skydance/Paramount deal, Gomez said, adding that the agency shouldn’t use delegated authority to act on such matters without at least three commissioners. “Right now, we don't have a quorum, so we cannot have agency action on these types of matters,” she said. “Anything less would leave agency action subject to shaky legal ground.”
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Gomez also decried FCC actions against public broadcasting stations, which she said are a necessary part of the nation’s emergency alerting network. “One of the first things that goes out, usually, is actually the power that gives us the internet,” she said. “And people go to their cars and they listen to their radio, or they get on the free over-the-air broadcasting in order to be able to get the information that they need during times of crisis.” Gomez also said she believes the U.S. Supreme Court would rule against many of the FCC's and White House’s actions against media organizations, but Chairman Brendan Carr’s use of investigations and threatening letters is intended to avoid generating concrete agency actions reviewable by courts. “I don't believe that the goal of these investigations is, in fact, to actually reach a final decision taking enforcement action,” she said. “I think it's entirely about the process in order to chill speech and affect behavior.”