With the heavy lifting on telecommunicatins reform legislation nearly complete, it’s all politics from here on out.
The Senate bill, engineered by Commerce Committee Chairman Larry Pressler, R-S.D., is ripe for floor action as early as next week. In the House, Telecommunications Subcommittee Chairman Jack Fields, R-Texas, promises to introduce legislation the same week. Hearings and markups will take up the rest of the month.
All this takes place against the backdrop of an overarching budget process that will transcend everything else in the second 100 days of the GOP-led Congress.
Presidential politics, meanwhile, is beginning to be played out on the sidelines and increasingly is influencing the debate on telecom, the budget and other issues. Maybe that’s why the Clinton administration has begun reasserting itself in the telecom debate, declaring the Senate bill bad for consumers.
Pressler and Vice President Gore, meanwhile, have been having food fights over whether Al really said Clinton would veto the Senate bill without some changes.
Rhetoric aside, some observers believe Clinton and Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, R-Kan., the top GOP presidential nominee so far, will embrace nearly any telecommunications reform bill Congress can deliver.
Larry Irving, head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and Justice Department antitrust chief Anne Bingaman met last Thursday with Senate staffers to air concerns about the Senate bill.
The Justice Department, to the chagrin of the administration, has only a marginal role in House and Senate bills. One reason, according to a source, has to do with Republican anger over Bingaman’s declaration that AirTouch Communications is a Bell after all.
Of course, that leaves the Federal Communications Commission with scores of new rulemakings to implement telecom reforms at a time when some folks want the agency shut down.
The administration has a couple wireless concerns with the Pressler bill.
First, it asserts the market definition used to determine interconnection compliance is too broad and unnecessarily lumps in wireless carriers.
Second, the administration believes the measure’s “elimination of (long-distance) equal access requirement for wireless carriers would result in severe harm to competition.”
Meanwhile, efforts to pre-empt local folks’ ability to determine whether a wireless antenna tower goes here, there or anywhere are running into snags. The trend toward taxation of wireless companies has industry worried.
Elsewhere, plans to expand the universal service pool in the Senate telecom bill is under attack by tax-reduction hawks.
…The Oregonian reports fireworks soon on how the Senate Ethics Committee handles the next stage of its investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., head of the Communications Subcommittee. He also chairs the Finance Committee, a panel key to Republican budget plans.
…James Warwick, 59, former FCC inspector general, died of pneumonia on April 4 in Seattle.
