15 Republican AGs Urge The Supreme Court To Make Providing Affordable Broadband To Poor People Illegal

Broadband

from the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things dept

The FCC runs an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called the Universal Service Fund. The program was historically a bipartisan thing, until the extremist Trump administration came to town.

Driven by a fake right wing consumer group called “Consumers’ Research,” the Trumplican-stacked Fifth Circuit court of appeals recently took the radical step of ruling the entire program unconstitutional. The ruling, which ignored past Fifth Circuit and Supreme Court precedent, effectively declared the USF an unconstitutional, illegal tax, something seven court dissenters said was a preposterous leap.

Now the Supreme Court has stated they’ll hear the case, which will ultimately determine whether federal efforts to expand broadband access to poor, rural neglected communities is effectively illegal or not.

Not too surprisingly, 15 MAGA loyal Attorneys General, apparently with nothing better to do, have thrown their support behind the effort to effectively make helping poor people afford broadband illegal:

“A coalition of Republican attorneys general from 15 states urged the Supreme Court Tuesday to find an $8 billion-per-year broadband subsidy unconstitutional. They argued the court should make it harder for Congress to delegate broad power to regulatory agencies.”

This is, of course, part of the broader radical Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle any sort of coherent federal governance, regardless of any sort of real world harm. This is, as we’ve noted previously, about eliminating all oversight of billionaires and corporations. But it’s routinely dressed up as some sort of noble constitutional battle by serious, good faith individuals.

“Yes, the Universal Service Fund serves some important purposes. But those purposes cannot trump constitutional precepts,” the attorney generals wrote in their amicus brief.

But nobody actually supports this outside of a handful of extremist far-right wingers. Even traditional GOP telecom allies and former Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai think this is a bad idea. And again, this case only exists due to a lawsuit by a fake consumer group named Consumers’ Research, whose website encourages people to report “woke” companies for making bare-bone efforts at empathy and inclusivity.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on March 26. It’s hard to say whether this is too extreme for even our extreme, Trump-loyal Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court declares the USF illegal, this could be leveraged to justify congressional “reform” of the program. But because Congress is broken and corrupt, it won’t be real reform. It will be corruption-fueled bullshit.

The Trump FCC’s idea of “reform” of the USF is to basically impose a massive new tax on Google and Netflix. That will drive up the cost of your streaming and other tech service bills, purportedly under the pretense of funding broadband and “bridging the digital divide.” But under Republican management I strongly suspect this will be little more than a slush fund for regional telecom monopolies like AT&T.

At the same time, the Trump administration and its loyal courts are dismantling the entirety of federal consumer protection at agencies like the FTC and FCC, ensuring regional telecom giants like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Charter can rip you off with zero real repercussions. What could possibly go wrong?

Filed Under: affordable, broadband, corruption, fcc, low income, reform, supreme court, telecom, usf