henry waxman

Hollywood Rep. to Wield Power Over Copyright Law

by Wayne Crews on November 20, 2008 · 1 comment

in Tech & Telecom

My colleague Cord asked me about proposing a tech agenda for Congress given the ascendancy today of Henry Waxman to Energy and Commerce Chairmanship; my immediate answer was “Adjourn.”

Anyway, the big news is that Rep Henry Waxman challenged John Dingell for Energy and Commerce Committee chairmanship, and won. E&C has jurisdiction over, well, everything.

Waxman has been a member of Congress since 1975, reminding us of the saliency of term limits. What matters, one might argue, is not that constituents have a right to continue electing a member to the House if they want to; but that the rest of the nation for whom he makes binding law never gets the opportunity to kick the guy to the curb. Nothing personal, but–33 years?

Anyway that’s irrelevant now:  Waxman’s focus will be health care, most assuredly, and energy policy also (have a look at President-elect Barack Obama’s platform for reassurance about this). Keeping Michigan’s Dingell in the E&C chairmanship would have meant that the Democrat’s favorite energy-and-renewable-mandate policies would have been blocked by the leading Michigan Democrat. So he obviously had to go. The auto industry is tough and can take a dose of Waxman, I guess is what they figure. Never mind all that business over the past couple weeks about a Detroit bailout; it’s Thursday, all that stuff was the other day.

But on tech policy: since the committee has jurisdiction over the Federal Communications Commission and the Chairman represents Hollywood, he is newly influential over copyright issues and broadcast concerns like “airtime” for candidates and obsure stuff like net neutrality (which is the idea that internet infrastructure belongs to everybody except those who built it). Watch for the “Fairness Doctrine” issue to re-emerge. If memory serves, this is the notion championed by Democrats who are upset that Oprah gave such an infusion of support to Barack Obama, so I think they’ll be trying to make her showcase some Republicans on her show. Pretty noble of the Congressman and the party.

More on Waxman and Tech

by Ryan Radia on November 20, 2008

in Tech & Telecom

As Cord mentioned earlier, Henry Waxman has been named incoming Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, of which the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet is a part. In his role, Waxman is likely to play an influential role in future tech policy fights involving issues such as universal broadband access and network neutrality. While Waxman has laudably defended civil liberties on many occasions, his record on telecommunications lawmaking is quite troubling.

Waxman has embraced forced openness for privately-owned networks, even threatening to cut off USF funding for telecom companies unwilling to open up their networks for device roaming. Though the USF itself is unneeded, and in some cases even counter-productive (as Cord argues), any government subsidies of rural telecommunications services should strive to minimize costs rather than reshape markets to suit political whims. Because mandatory access is often at odds with the bottom line, demanding that carriers grant access to any device often leads to a reduction in infrastructure investment. America’s rural areas would be better served by a competitive marketplace in which companies are free to experiment with all kinds of pricing plans and service offerings to suit evolving consumer demands.

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Lehman Bros hearing — Rep. Maloney blames deregulation, ignores her own role as Fannie’s enabler

by John Berlau on October 6, 2008 · 2 comments

in Bailout Watch, Odds & Ends, Politics as Usual

At the hearing being held today by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in which former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld is now testifying, an earlier panel attempted to look at the causes of Lehman’s collapse and the broader credit cirisis. And this gave an opportunity to committee members to ride their various hobby horses.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s horse and “whipping boy” was deregulation. She blamed the entire crisis on deregulation, and specifically the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law that separated commercial and investment banking. The repeal was done through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which Maloney neglected to say was passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1999. Clinton, in fact, recently defended the law, saying it didn’t contribute much to the current crisis, and has even alleviated it by allowing banks to save failing brokerages. (Clinton is right, as a Wall Street Journal editorial points out).

But if Maloney wants to know a more proximate cause of the systemic risk from bad mortgages, she should look no further than her own attacks on Competitive Enterprise Institute President Fred Smith when he testified before the House Financial Services Committee in 2000. Maloney was one of many lawmakers who enabled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take excessive risks by ridiculing longtime critics of he government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) such as Smith. As Smith recalled in a recent op-ed in Investor’s Business Daily, Maloney poo-poohed his argument that Fannie and Freddie’s government privileges could result in a bailout.

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