Comments on: Republican Nominees for FCC

By: laptop battery

laptop battery — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:51:52 +0000

Hope to be better. Better means more features.

By: laptop battery

laptop battery — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:51:52 +0000

Hope to be better. Better means more features.

By: Berin Szoka

Berin Szoka — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:17:12 +0000

Amen, Seth! I was just about to make the same point.

Now, obviously, as repeat players in a long term "game" (to put this in game theoretic terms), both parties have a strong incentive to abide by an implicit agreement that they'll alternate between 3 Dems, 2 Reps and vice versa depending on who's in control. It would certainly be interesting to see what would happen the first time a president deviated from this long-term equilibrium. Why not appoint 2 Dems, a Rep, a Green, and a Libertarian?

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:48:18 +0000

Three Democrats, a Green, and one Republican? That would suck.

It seems to me that you could fill all the seats with members of the TLF collective: Adam and Jim can fill the Republican seats, and Drew and Tim the Democrat seats.

By: Berin Szoka

Berin Szoka — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:17:12 +0000

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:48:18 +0000

By: Seth Schoen

Seth Schoen — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:15:58 +0000

It always bothers me when the FCC seats are described as legally belonging to Republicans or Democrats. In fact, the legal rule is 47 USC §154(b)(5), which only provides:

"The maximum number of commissioners who may be members of the same political party shall be a number equal to the least number of commissioners which constitutes a majority of the full membership of the Commission."

So there is no requirement of any sort that any FCC seats have to be filled by anyone of any particular party. Members of the Senate conventionally assume (and expect) that there will be three Commission seats held by members of the President's political party and two seats held by members of the largest party in the Senate other than the President's party. However, this is not a legal requirement at all. Just as there is a Senator who does not belong to a political party, there can be an FCC Commissioner who does not belong to a political party, or there could be a third-party commissioner.

It's reasonable for someone writing about the FCC to predict that the tradition that all FCC Comissioners will be members of a political party will continue (only one past Commissioner, Ewell Jett, is listed by Wikipedia without an affiliation as a Republican or Democrat), but the basis of this tradition is solely the behavior of Senate caucuses, not the law.