The Senate will vote on the nominations of Gigi Sohn to the and Alvaro Bedoya to the , respectively. The Senate Commerce Committee their nominations, although the 14-14 tie means there might be a further procedural step for every earlier than a full Senate vote.
Democrats and Republicans every have 50 senators although Vice President Kamala Harris has a tie-breaker vote. Should Sohn and Bedoya be confirmed as commissioners, the Democrats will maintain a majority in each the FCC and FTC.
The committee delayed a vote on the nominations after Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) suffered a stroke in January. Luján, whose vote was wanted for Democrats to maneuver the nominations ahead, has since returned to work.
President Biden nominated Sohn on the similar time he put ahead Jessica Rosenworcel as FCC chair . While the Senate permitted Rosenworcel’s in December, Sohn’s appointment has taken longer. As such, the FCC has been deadlocked at 2-2 alongside occasion traces, leaving Rosenworcel unable to, amongst different issues, advance a internet neutrality coverage.
Opposition to the nomination of Sohn, a longtime for internet neutrality, has come from a lot of quarters, together with the . The group urged senators to vote down Sohn’s nomination because of her “hostility towards copyright law.” Sohn was beforehand on the board of Locast, a that rebroadcast over-the-air TV broadcast alerts by way of the web. She stated she’d recuse herself from points regarding retransmission consent and broadcast copyright.
In affirmation hearings, Republicans portrayed Sohn as an excessive partisan. She at these assertions, arguing that she had been topic to “unrelenting, unfair and outright false criticism and scrutiny.”
The FTC, in the meantime, is within the strategy of reviewing some vital proposed mergers. According to studies, these embrace and . Reports counsel the FTC is an antitrust problem to dam the Amazon-MGM deal, although it could want a majority vote to proceed with a lawsuit.
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