Friend,

This is not the email we wanted to send: After enduring endless attacks, this week Gigi Sohn withdrew her nomination to the Federal Communications Commission.

This ends a two-year fight to put an accomplished public servant in the important fifth seat at the FCC. In the end, after nearly 500 days, multiple confirmation hearings and a relentless industry-orchestrated campaign against her, Sohn didn’t have enough votes in the Senate to move forward.

We are beyond angry about how Sohn was treated over the past 16 months. The bullies won this time. And Democratic leaders by and large failed to speak out against the lies, bigotry and innuendo surrounding her nomination.

So how did we get here?

• The long delay in nominating a new FCC chair and commissioner meant that Sohn wasn’t nominated until late October 2021 and then got little time amid debates around the infrastructure bills. Instead of moving on this nomination right away, when the Biden team had the most political capital — they did it when they had the least.
• 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.
• While the GOP ganged up on her, most Senate Democrats sat back, either using their time on the dais to ask questions about their home states or repeat industry-written talking points. (Notable and laudable exceptions who came to Sohn’s defense include Sens. Ed Markey and Tammy Baldwin.)
• Neither the White House nor Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer succeeded in getting the votes Sohn needed when she got through committee and to the verge of a floor vote last year. They didn’t put enough pressure on holdout senators or create any real political costs for the holdouts’ refusal to back the administration’s nominees.
• President Biden and Vice President Harris actually feted ISP execs in the Rose Garden — even as those same companies were sabotaging Sohn.
• Without real pressure from the top, rank-and-file Democrats invented excuses for why they couldn’t vote before the midterms — and, once those were over, immediately recycled the same rationalizations about the 2024 election.
• Democratic senators — like Sens. Cortez-Masto, Kelly, Rosen and Tester, who all failed to publicly support Sohn — took the lies of a disreputable group like the Fraternal Order of Police more seriously than they did the support of 400 of the nation’s largest civil-rights, civil-liberties, labor and public-interest groups.

Companies like Comcast and Fox will likely only double-down in the future on the kinds of deceitful and dirty tactics they deployed against Sohn.

There’s still a vacancy at the FCC. The temptation now will be to put forward an industry-friendly nominee. But that would be a step backward. We must oppose and reject any return to business as usual that furthers industry capture of the FCC.

Instead, we need to demand an independent candidate with public-interest bona fides and a clear commitment to racial justice and civil rights. They must show they’re willing to stand up to lies. They must be unequivocal in their support for restoring the FCC’s authority, and making sure that the internet is open, affordable, available and reliable for everyone. They must demonstrate a commitment to engaging the public, not just meeting with lobbyists.

This loss stings. Gigi Sohn deserved better. But we cannot let the industry pick their regulators ever again.

Onward,

Craig Aaron
Co-CEO
Free Press and Free Press Action
freepress.net

P.S. The bullies may have won this round, but this fight is far from over. Help us push the Biden administration to immediately nominate a new candidate to fill the tie-breaking seat at the FCC with an emergency donation to Free Press Action today.