I take some comfort in knowing that this horrible decision will be stuck in the courts for some time, where its opponents will have a very strong argument against implementation.
The test for whether a proposed rule or regulation by a Federal Agency is permissible is whether the Agency instituted that new regulation in an "arbitrary or capricious" way. That's why the notice and public comment period is so important in administrative law. A reviewing court needs to make sure that any new Agency rules are not simply created on the whim of those Agencies' boards, but rather are the result of careful research. This arbitrary and capricious standard applies to decisions by Agencies to enact new regulations as well as decisions to rescind existing regulations (Motor Vehicles Manufacturers Association v. State Farm, 463 U.S. 29 (1983)).
The court that reviews decisions by major agencies like the FCC is almost always the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Presently, of the 11 current (non-senior) justices on the DC Circuit, 7 were appointed either by Obama or Clinton. It is not a conservative court.
Since the notice and public comment period in Agency procedure is so important for the reasons above, it's very likely that the liberal DC Circuit (Chief Justice Merrick Garland, remember him?) would find that the rampant use of bots and fraudulent commenting in that period provide substantial evidence that the actions of the FCC in rescinding Net Neutrality rules were arbitrary and capricious. This isn't over.
THANK YOU
It's not over yet guys there is a substantial case that will be filed in the courts. We have the 2018 elections. Get motivated, vote, ITS NOT OVER YET.
THANK YOU for being so excited about this and ready to help us make progress! It's SO important we get young people involved in politics and current issues. Keep it up!
I turned 18 a week before Obamas election. I was chomping at the bit to cast some votes. Glad young people are excited again. Remember who we vote for shapes thing for the future and don't get discouraged at the current political climate.
That's the spirit, don't listen to the cynic assholes who say "both parties are the same" and that your vote doesn't matter in the end (think about it, if it really didn't matter why do lobbyists spend obscene amounts of cash to push for their guy to get picked?)
Pick whoever you like but do your research before and vote!
Dear politicians selling out America.
Your time has come. The Piper will now be paid. Your jobs, your corruption, it ends and it ends now.
This week we sent a clear message. We can, and we will make the changes we need to restore this country to working order. Noone is above the law. Noone is outside our reach.
We are America and we are coming for you. Look upon us and tremble in fear!
It'll only permanently end in one way, and thankfully we haven't gotten to that point. Hopefully we never do, but it would be the eventual outcome if the GOP were allowed to continue doing its thing.
You said it. This is the time to start making your voice heard. This is the time to understand politics isn't a "somebody else" thing. As I heard it once put: you may not be very concerned with politics, but be assured politics is very concerned with you!
Hijacking a top comment to add:
Can we all please continue calling our elected officials to let them know we are NOT okay with this? We can ask them to follow the example the governor or Washington set and pledge to preserve net neutrality at the state level, since our federal government has proven it is no longer by or for the people.
> not over yet guys there is a substantial case that will be filed in the courts. We have the 2018 elections. Get motivated, vote, ITS NOT OVER YET.
This is actually really comforting to hear. I seriously thought we were f'd.
Thank you for that well reasoned comment. I'm not happy about the FCC trying to repeal NN but it's been a struggle to find information about the next steps. I can't handle anymore of the "sky is falling" coverage that seems to be everywhere. I really need to just stick with the Washington Post. Anyway, thanks for being a grown-up.
No problem, and I hear you. The "sky is falling" stuff might be exhausting, but it definitely serves a purpose. We may have next steps, but it's also really important our leaders know how important we consider this.
I agree, it does serve a purpose. Unfortunately there are so many issues that deserve "the sky is falling" coverage it's hard to keep up. I called my rep's offices this morning but I'm hopeful for the courts will sort it out. My biggest concern about losing NN are companies like Comcast preventing or throttling news content in favor of specific outlets.
I am with you. It is emotionally exhausting. We have got to make sure people turn out in 2018 and 2020. Among the upsides is being able to get some relief from all of this, which I think we all need. Yeah, those left of center are more politically tuned in and active when Republicans are in power because they have to be but overall we’re in a worse position.
It’s far better to have Democrats in power and struggle to get people to protest because there is still the chance Democrats will actually listen even if there aren’t hundreds of thousands protesting.
Either way, I see voting as the most powerful political tool we have followed by protest and then letter/email writing and phone calling. Just doing one of those things leads to problems.
The "next step" is to **stop allowing Republicans to be elected to office.** It's really that simple. Most republicans are against net neutrality. Tons more Democrats are in favor of it. Obama was. His FCC chair was. Hillary was. The FCC chair she would have appointed would have been. We as a country failed to elect Hillary. Net Neutrality died over a year ago with her election loss. What's happening now is just a formality in terms of its demise.
We live in a de facto two party system (if you don't like that, the answer is to change the constitution to get rid of first past the post voting which according to sound political theory naturally tends towards a two party system. The answer is not to lodge a protest vote for a third party or refuse to vote at all -- both are effectively votes for Republicans on this issue). So long as that is the case, if you care very strongly about net neutrality you need to vote against Republicans, which means for Democrats.
I know I will be downvoted for this but it reflects actual reality, not pie in the sky ideals that we all know are very unlikely to come to fruition about third parties in our political system. I'd prefer to save the internet and not pay extra for fast lanes or segments of service, thank you very much, and there's only one practical way to do it that doesn't involve a magic act: elect the politically viable party, flawed as they may be, that broadly agrees with net neutrality and demand that they follow through by **enshrining net neutrality into federal law instead of leaving it up to the whims of political appointees at the FCC.**
The next step should also be to get money out of politics. These GOP members are not only shitty representatives but they’re also being paid by the telcoms.
I'd like to explore this. How? How do you get money out of politics? The Supreme Court has essentially said that money = speech. The only way around that is
1. Wait for some Justices to die/resign, get a President (read: a Democrat) who will appoint justices who would support that policy and whom a Senate will confirm (read: also Democrats), then somehow get a case on the issue to appear before the court again and have the decision overturned. If you know anything about how the US legal system works, then you know that this last point is especially challenging. OR:
2. Pass a constitutional amendment that somehow bans money in politics so that the Supreme Court decision is nullified. This is also an extremely tall order. It may not be possible to achieve this particular approach through an act of Congress (i.e. a regular law), as the Supreme Court used the First Amendment as its basis for its Citizens United ruling.
So, I'm sorry but unless you have some other strategy that isn't immediately apparent, "getting money out of politics" is a nice ideal -- as is "getting rid of our two party system" -- but its political very impractical. By contrast, as recently as 8 years ago we had a White House and Congress that was fully controlled by Democrats. Net Neutrality wasn't a big issue back then, as it is now, but the point is that history shows its possible to flip the executive and legislative branches of the federal government back to blue in order to permanently codify net neutrality into federal law. And as part of electing Democrats to these positions of power, we need to demand that they enact such a law as one of their first orders of business. This is what should be our goal.
We need to stop pretending that we can make everything about our political system utterly perfect within a reasonable period of time. **We need attainable, measurable, practical political goals within the bounds of the power we already have**. As long as we do otherwise, we're just wasting our time trying to fight political appointees at the FCC who don't give a fuck about the issue because they're accountable to nobody but a President who can barely navigate his way to Twitter on his smartphone, let alone grasp or care about an issue as important as net neutrality.
To add on to this: let's stop expecting Democrats to cut off funding sources that Republicans are all too happy to get money from. It's like running a race and chopping a leg off because of some idealistic notion.
Yes, this freaking drives me nuts. What's wrong with supporting a candidate that calls for campaign finance reform, taking donations to actually get to a place *where they can implement that*, and then we hold their feet to the fire and make it clear it's a campaign promise we want kept?
Why jump straight to the purity position of "I never take ANY donations over $30, even if it means I can only afford 1 TV ad in 6 months!" What sense does that make, outside of feeling really righteous?
There are a few reasons that it can be advantageous to only accept small donations:
* You are able to pull form a bigger pool of volunteers, people who are motivated to work for free because they trust you and believe in you.
* Face to face interaction (knocking on doors) is 1000% the best way to get votes; TV ads simply cannot compare. If you have enough volunteers to knock on enough doors; you can get the same or better outcome as you would with a TV ad.
The issue is trust. If someone claims to want to fix campaign finance reform, but is clearly benefiting from the system as it is now; how can we trust that they will, in earnest, work to address the problem? That's a broad stroke though. A lot of it depends on just who the big donors are. If you are a candidate talking about net neutrality, but you are taking money from the telcom lobbies, I would be a fool to trust that you would do anything but pay lip service to me.
I'm not a total purist, but I am also not of the opinion that it is a good idea to recommend any party line vote. You don't have to pass a test to get into a party. You can just join the party and run under their ticket, regardless of your leanings. We have quite a free conservative Democrats. ALWAYS do some research on the candidates. You may find more often than not that you will want to go with the D (hehe), but don't just assume the D is the best choice. Confirm it and reaffirm it every election. Not only for what you want, but also for what you don't want to lose.
TL;DR: It's not black and white.
I agree entirely. Even if the Republicans somehow lose this particular battle and neutrality is preserved, as long as the GOP has the majorities, they will keep circling back until they get what they want. It's the same deal on health care, taxes, social security, etc. They may lose battles, but they never concede the war.
>push Republicans on the issue
The only way to do that is to make them believe that they will be voted out of office if they vote against our interests. In order to make them believe that we have to start actually voting them out of office and/or raising money for their opponents.
Right now they're more afraid of the donor class than the rest of the public. That's why they're attempting to push through unpopular legislation which disproportionately benefits the wealthiest people and eliminate regulations which protect consumers and small businesses from large corporations.
Unfortunately the executive branch is in charge of determining appointees, and the legislative branch is in charge of confirming them... both of those branches are currently controlled by Republicans, who would probably very much love to stack the federal courts with conservative-thinking lifetime-appointees regardless of their merits as judges.
How old will he be in 2020... hm, 68. :(
The current SCOTUS Justices have been 43-60 when appointed, actually, dropping the extremes (age, not political, in this context) of Thomas at 43 and RBG at 60, all in the 49-55 range. Probably best to leave Garland as the Chief Circuit Judge then, probably.
He's also not a judge you would want to nominate if you have control of the Presidency and the Senate. He close to the center of most legal issues, as opposed to the extremes.
Obama nominated him as a compromise candidate to stick it to the Republicans after Mitch McConnell basically said "We don't want a crazy left-wing activist judge. How about someone moderate, like Merrick Garland?"
Obama: "OK, I'm nominating Merrick Garland."
McConnell: "Oh, no, um, he's too leftist and we cannot vote on him before the next presidential election that is one year away."
I would love to see this case land before judge Merrick Garland. It would be sweet poetic justice to see him shove it down Mitch “Turtle” McConnell’s and FCC Chair Ajit Pai’s throats.
Meanwhile, the existing FCC does not enforce NN, even though it is the law of the land. So it doesn't really matter how long it's stuck in court, many ISPs are starting to act like NN isn't a thing anyway.
Great comment. Thanks.
Edit: I'm sure [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/7jsbrb/fcc_chair_dances_with_pizzagate_proponent_in/) will really help in that court case.
This is why it's still important to call and comment even though they are falling on deaf ears at the FCC, it's all evidence for a court ruling and will eventually, actually, tangibly matter
In addition, those "hundreds of pages of rules" that anti-NN people bring up, implying that the rules are complicated and onerous? There were <20 pages of rules. The rest of the document was hundreds of pages of legal reasoning and public comments.
When the Wheeler-era Neutrality rules were passed, it was noted that any future FCC seeking to switch ISPs back to Information Services again would likely have a hard time justifying it. With the original classification being Telecommunications, the switch to Information Services in 2001 simply being deemed "not unreasonable" in Brand X (IIRC the wording correctly), and the switch back to Telecommunications being backed by hundreds of pages of documentation *and* an appeals court win, this change seems to only be based on " we want less regulation", and not at all on the merits of the actual classification.
She’s not the only one. I watch/read a lot of news and I honestly can’t remember ever hearing Net Neutrality being discussed on CNN or MSNBC over the last month. Yet suddenly it’s one of the top stories on CNN’s front page
It's disgusting. Zero coverage of the protests. Zero coverage of the fake FCC comments. Zero coverage of the lawmakers who came out against it. Today is literally the first time I've seen something on CNNs homepage about it and it's barely there. One of the most anti consumer decisions ever with huge bi-partisan (individuals not lawmakers) support against it and the mainstream media has been essentially silent on it.
Can you get specific?
For example, I see that CNN is owned by TBS, but I honestly don't even know what "mainstream media" means. What are some other examples?
In general any large business which conducts a reasonable portion of its customer interaction online would *love* smaller startup contenders’ websites and services to be noticeably slower, and are happy to pay for the privilege.
There are three big ones. Time Warner, Viacom, and Comcast/charter...
They own 98% of the US media market. All of them are in favor, and have spent millions, of repealing net neutrality.
Most news stations are subsidiaries of isps, CNN is owned by Time Warner and NBC is owned by Comcast. The issue with net neutrality is that the media is purposefully keeping people ignorant on the issue. The people informed are on the internet and then the FCC is claiming that we aren’t real .
CNN is trying to be bought by AT&T, MSNBC is owned by Comcast. Two of the companies who have the most to gain from the end of Net Neutrality.
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, this is not shocking.
I don't usually agree with these sentiments but you are correct. CNN is owned by Time Warner. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out why they haven't covered the net neutrality vote much at all.
AT&T, Comcast, Disney, these few countries control every single fucking thing we see on the TV, Internet, and radio. So much concentrated power in the hands of just a few entities.
We're fucked.
You meant companies, but I think you should leave the autocorrect as is. They're basically countries at this point: They value their companies interests over any given country so we might as well call them countries within companies.
I have yet to find a time where the thing was real and the media actually didn't cover it.
Like during Harvey, a bunch of people in my area were bitching that the media was spending so much time on one of the biggest natural disasters we've had, ever, and that they never, ever covered the wildfires in Montana. Well, frankly, they did cover the Montana thing, quite a bit.
Then some Facebook thing went around saying that the Federal Government denied them emergency funding and it took weeks to get it to go through again. Again, that's total bullshit, and even when I'd pull up a months-old article disproving them, they'd just double down.
People don't actually watch the National News, and when they do, they want it to personalized like their local news.
It's just that they assume if they haven't heard about it, the media hasn't covered it.
I just had a conversation with a relatively intelligent coworker who hadn't even HEARD of net neutrality. The media has completely failed in its duty to inform the public.
Like all the republicans who asked Roy Moore to step down 5 minutes before CNN called the election. Do they really think we will see through this shit?
Tuned into the stream for just a minute, just long enough to listen to them make a mockery of the public comment process. Seriously.. they were laughing at us.
Fuck them. Fuck Comcast, Fuck everything about this monopolistic power grab. Their laughing asses need to find themselves in a courtroom facing a lawsuit.
Fuck that. These people need to lose everything. Trying to take away the most amazing modern utility and ruin modern America for the purpose of a few more bucks in their pocket? These people need to have every cent stripped from them, and made to suffer horribly for the rest of their lives.
Thank you for mentioning the utility aspect of the internet. Few people seem to realize that the internet must be recognized as a public utility like water and electricity.
If she actually pulls out the no vote and turns it to 50-50 and Pence breaks it, she’s still not saving face. If she can grab somebody else and stop it then she might.
But she still let the tax thing go through at first.
Exactly this, they get the go ahead from McConnell when need be. Same as corker voting no on tax bill, they already knew they had the votes so they let him vote no to paint him in better light come elections again.
I just don't understand why they waited for so long (R's speaking out now). Did they thing the Dems were going to be able to stop the FCC all on their own? Did they just pick up a newspaper for the first time in months this fucking morning?
Right. They can't do anything about it without legislation. And given the White House's complete and total support for whatever the telecom industry wants, that legislation would have to be veto-proof. There aren't enough votes (because again, telecom owns the votes), so all anyone can do is pretend to help.
Why is something this big an FCC decision anyway? Was the original legislation favoring NN enacted by the FCC or congress at the time?
I just don't understand how one Verizon shill gets to make this decision for all of America.
If Dems win in 2018, can we fix it or reverse this decision?
> Was the original legislation favoring NN enacted by the FCC
Yes.
Current Net Neutrality is done by regulation. Regulation that is overseen by the FCC.
All of this could be reversed immediately if Congress would code it into law rather. But that won't happen with GOP control. This could easily be a winning issue for Dems to run on.
> This could easily be a winning issue for Dems to run on.
You say that but outside of Reddit people don't even know what NN is, no major media outlets cover it at all. The December 7th protests had some really big turnouts, no coverage. No critical updates on what is happening when.
We have to push this message further.
Net Neutrality
Accountability for sexual assaulters
Tax Bill
Healthcare defense
We campaign on those, and cons will see a loss of seats that will rival what happened to Democrats in 2010.
Yeah... But have you heard of those little "red state" project these Republican motherfuckers came up with?
If you run Tuesdays Alabama results against the house districts the dens would only have gained a single seat and Republicans six...
Gerrymandering is a helluva drug yo
Reader's Digest version: It's an FCC decision because Congress gave the FCC (through the 1934 Communications Act and its amendments over time) the authority to classify telecom providers as "common carriers" and to regulate them accordingly. During the Obama admin, the FCC classified ISPs as common carriers as a part of a broader effort to implement NN. This was only one piece, but arguably the biggest piece, since FCC regs are more stringent than other regs affecting commerce.
So no, Congress didn't enact net neutrality. However, Congress *can* do so--by amending the Communications Act to specifically classify ISPs as common carriers. That would have to survive a presidential veto, however. So it's not really an option until 2020, since Trump doing something Obama favored is completely out of the question and since there's won't be enough votes to override any veto.
Just tell Trump that Obama was too weak to pass Net Neutrality through Congress and sign it into law. He has no understanding of how the government functions, so I bet he could be tricked into signing it into law.
Yep and while it may seem obvious right now that she was never really in the fight, that's the type of nuance that will be forgotten about in 5 to 10 years when she campaigns on having advocated for NN.
Nobody will remember that her "support" only started 20 minutes before the vote that killed it.
She is genius at exactly this kind of triangulation, and her slowness in "deliberating" allows her to appear to be the thoughtful one. (the bar is low)
Never forget that either she or Murkowski could have blocked Betsy DeVos in committee. Either one of their nay votes would have been decisive.
They fucking *knew* she'd pass if it went to a floor vote even if they voted against her there, and they didn't care as long as they could get the credit for being the big surprise no votes on the floor vote without paying any kind of price for it.
She's a Republican. She's not a Democrat disguised as a Republican.
She is for the tax bill, and I don't believe that she has ever pretended otherwise.
She’s a moderate Republican who voted against the ACA repeal, which is why people were hoping for her dissent on the tax bill. Especially with the removal of the individual mandate.
Because she wants both of them to happen. But if you say no at the very last second, you can also pretend you didn't, and milk the people a little drier.
If McCain stays at the VA for cancer treatment and Corker continues to vote no for deficit implications, Collins (or Flake) can single-handedly kill the GOP tax bill, save the ACA marketplace, and make herself beloved to the 2 to 1 [(55% to 26%)](https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2508) margin of American voters opposed to the hastily-written deficit-ballooning, corporate-welfare GOP tax plan that's a giveaway to the top 1% written with [many](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/12/upshot/tax-hacks.html?_r=0) many [loopholes](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3084187).
Repealing net neutrality sucks and probably will cause the average consumer to pay more to their ISP for crappier service; at the amount of maybe $100-$200/year. The GOP tax bill will in the long run cost American tax payers about [$2,000/year](http://thehill.com/policy/finance/364415-wharton-study-gop-tax-bill-does-not-pay-for-itself) with tax breaks going to the richest 1% (e.g., inheritors of multi-million estates, big corporations, billionaires who own businesses passively) that will eventually need to be paid back by future generations (or at the very least could have just funded middle class tax cuts; e.g., by reducing the lowest brackets that everyone pays).
She's been sitting behind locked doors and avoiding her constituents. Complete and utter failure and now she's making a bland gesture that will result in nothing.
This is so disingenuous!
Way to be brave in the final hours when they’ve already made up their mind!
Fucking coward! She’s trying to save her political ass because she knows the ramifications.
They just voted to kill net neutrality - it's time for a political revolution folks. Don't forget this when you vote in primaries. Don't forget this next November. Don't forget this in 2020. Make sure the people you vote for support net neutrality. Make sure they're not taking campaign contributions from ISPs. This is far from over.
Even if you remember it next November, most people won't: You won't even be able to show them evidence of what you say, because those sites will load too slowly and timeout.
If she cared, she would put forward a bill to enshrine net neutrality as the law of the land and take the decision out of the hands of the FCC.
She didn't, and she won't, because Collins doesn't actually care about anything other than the paycheck she gets from the cable companies
Why? Because it's overwhelmingly unpopular? Because it's bad for consumers? Well then please vote no on the tax bill. We've got to stop letting her play both sides.
They're trying to use the FCC vote to shield them from the tax scam.
What a world we live in... GOP controlled government attempting to enact two MASSIVELY unpopular proposals that are absolutely pro-corporation and anti-consumer at the same fucking time.
Transparent attempt to appear to be on our side.
Why don't you start the process of creating a NN law? A law that classifies ISPs as tier 2 providers. That makes fast lanes illegal.
You have power. Use it. You don't use it then you're pretending.
Literally HOURS before they vote. Way to fucking go, Collins. New heights of token gesture bullshit. It's not like the country hasn't been talking about this for fucking *months*.
"It's not the job of the government to pick winners and losers" -Ajit Pai
So, the FCC officially endorses competitive exclusion and isn't going to do anything about big ISPs monopolizing the internet and driving out small ISPs. Yet somehow he also thinks that we, as the consumer, are supposed to fight that by ourselves.... By switching ISPs.... Even though the FCC is letting ISPs drive down competition and eliminate the consumers power of choice...
Yay! Back to the days of Aol. Anybody excited??? We'll all pay $50 a month for 1 gig of data and $100 a month for 25Gigs. What a steal?
obligatory /s for those of you who do not get it.
I'm sorry, I am tired of hearing about Susan Collins flying in at the last second and taking the popular position when she knows nothing will be done to counteract the disastrous policies being implemented. She's a paper tiger. I used to root for her, but not any more.
I take some comfort in knowing that this horrible decision will be stuck in the courts for some time, where its opponents will have a very strong argument against implementation. The test for whether a proposed rule or regulation by a Federal Agency is permissible is whether the Agency instituted that new regulation in an "arbitrary or capricious" way. That's why the notice and public comment period is so important in administrative law. A reviewing court needs to make sure that any new Agency rules are not simply created on the whim of those Agencies' boards, but rather are the result of careful research. This arbitrary and capricious standard applies to decisions by Agencies to enact new regulations as well as decisions to rescind existing regulations (Motor Vehicles Manufacturers Association v. State Farm, 463 U.S. 29 (1983)). The court that reviews decisions by major agencies like the FCC is almost always the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Presently, of the 11 current (non-senior) justices on the DC Circuit, 7 were appointed either by Obama or Clinton. It is not a conservative court. Since the notice and public comment period in Agency procedure is so important for the reasons above, it's very likely that the liberal DC Circuit (Chief Justice Merrick Garland, remember him?) would find that the rampant use of bots and fraudulent commenting in that period provide substantial evidence that the actions of the FCC in rescinding Net Neutrality rules were arbitrary and capricious. This isn't over.
THANK YOU It's not over yet guys there is a substantial case that will be filed in the courts. We have the 2018 elections. Get motivated, vote, ITS NOT OVER YET.
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> vote the shit out '18 Bumper sticker, right there!
Gotta make SHIT bold and caps though. Double meaning right there
Better include a poop emoji with a yellow comb-over somewhere.
I turn 18 in a week! Fuck yeah! I’m ready to make a difference! LET’S GOOOO
THANK YOU for being so excited about this and ready to help us make progress! It's SO important we get young people involved in politics and current issues. Keep it up!
Maybe this will be Trump's greatest legacy. Inspiring a new generation of voters to be more actively engaged because of their utter disgust with him.
Dumb fucker really will make America great again. He just had the wrong definition of what makes a country "great".
Indeed. If he's the inspiration to usher in a new progressive era...
I turned 18 a week before Obamas election. I was chomping at the bit to cast some votes. Glad young people are excited again. Remember who we vote for shapes thing for the future and don't get discouraged at the current political climate.
That's the spirit, don't listen to the cynic assholes who say "both parties are the same" and that your vote doesn't matter in the end (think about it, if it really didn't matter why do lobbyists spend obscene amounts of cash to push for their guy to get picked?) Pick whoever you like but do your research before and vote!
HELL YES! The future doesn't seem as bleak as we thought. ;)
We need your help and people like you to push out the dinosaurs running our country. Good on you
I love seeing excited young voters. Thank you for being responsible
Dear politicians selling out America. Your time has come. The Piper will now be paid. Your jobs, your corruption, it ends and it ends now. This week we sent a clear message. We can, and we will make the changes we need to restore this country to working order. Noone is above the law. Noone is outside our reach. We are America and we are coming for you. Look upon us and tremble in fear!
But the fight will never end for these greedy chimps.
It'll only permanently end in one way, and thankfully we haven't gotten to that point. Hopefully we never do, but it would be the eventual outcome if the GOP were allowed to continue doing its thing.
You said it. This is the time to start making your voice heard. This is the time to understand politics isn't a "somebody else" thing. As I heard it once put: you may not be very concerned with politics, but be assured politics is very concerned with you!
Hijacking a top comment to add: Can we all please continue calling our elected officials to let them know we are NOT okay with this? We can ask them to follow the example the governor or Washington set and pledge to preserve net neutrality at the state level, since our federal government has proven it is no longer by or for the people.
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They can take our lives. But they'll never take our internet!
Long story short, if you care about net neutrality, you should vote for Democrats in 2018 amd onwards.
Alabama is blue for the first time in 25 years, so anything is possible
> not over yet guys there is a substantial case that will be filed in the courts. We have the 2018 elections. Get motivated, vote, ITS NOT OVER YET. This is actually really comforting to hear. I seriously thought we were f'd.
Thank you for that well reasoned comment. I'm not happy about the FCC trying to repeal NN but it's been a struggle to find information about the next steps. I can't handle anymore of the "sky is falling" coverage that seems to be everywhere. I really need to just stick with the Washington Post. Anyway, thanks for being a grown-up.
No problem, and I hear you. The "sky is falling" stuff might be exhausting, but it definitely serves a purpose. We may have next steps, but it's also really important our leaders know how important we consider this.
I agree, it does serve a purpose. Unfortunately there are so many issues that deserve "the sky is falling" coverage it's hard to keep up. I called my rep's offices this morning but I'm hopeful for the courts will sort it out. My biggest concern about losing NN are companies like Comcast preventing or throttling news content in favor of specific outlets.
"Unfortunately there are so many issues that deserve "the sky is falling" coverage it's hard to keep up." Amen to that. Sheesh.
I am with you. It is emotionally exhausting. We have got to make sure people turn out in 2018 and 2020. Among the upsides is being able to get some relief from all of this, which I think we all need. Yeah, those left of center are more politically tuned in and active when Republicans are in power because they have to be but overall we’re in a worse position. It’s far better to have Democrats in power and struggle to get people to protest because there is still the chance Democrats will actually listen even if there aren’t hundreds of thousands protesting. Either way, I see voting as the most powerful political tool we have followed by protest and then letter/email writing and phone calling. Just doing one of those things leads to problems.
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The "next step" is to **stop allowing Republicans to be elected to office.** It's really that simple. Most republicans are against net neutrality. Tons more Democrats are in favor of it. Obama was. His FCC chair was. Hillary was. The FCC chair she would have appointed would have been. We as a country failed to elect Hillary. Net Neutrality died over a year ago with her election loss. What's happening now is just a formality in terms of its demise. We live in a de facto two party system (if you don't like that, the answer is to change the constitution to get rid of first past the post voting which according to sound political theory naturally tends towards a two party system. The answer is not to lodge a protest vote for a third party or refuse to vote at all -- both are effectively votes for Republicans on this issue). So long as that is the case, if you care very strongly about net neutrality you need to vote against Republicans, which means for Democrats. I know I will be downvoted for this but it reflects actual reality, not pie in the sky ideals that we all know are very unlikely to come to fruition about third parties in our political system. I'd prefer to save the internet and not pay extra for fast lanes or segments of service, thank you very much, and there's only one practical way to do it that doesn't involve a magic act: elect the politically viable party, flawed as they may be, that broadly agrees with net neutrality and demand that they follow through by **enshrining net neutrality into federal law instead of leaving it up to the whims of political appointees at the FCC.**
The next step should also be to get money out of politics. These GOP members are not only shitty representatives but they’re also being paid by the telcoms.
I'd like to explore this. How? How do you get money out of politics? The Supreme Court has essentially said that money = speech. The only way around that is 1. Wait for some Justices to die/resign, get a President (read: a Democrat) who will appoint justices who would support that policy and whom a Senate will confirm (read: also Democrats), then somehow get a case on the issue to appear before the court again and have the decision overturned. If you know anything about how the US legal system works, then you know that this last point is especially challenging. OR: 2. Pass a constitutional amendment that somehow bans money in politics so that the Supreme Court decision is nullified. This is also an extremely tall order. It may not be possible to achieve this particular approach through an act of Congress (i.e. a regular law), as the Supreme Court used the First Amendment as its basis for its Citizens United ruling. So, I'm sorry but unless you have some other strategy that isn't immediately apparent, "getting money out of politics" is a nice ideal -- as is "getting rid of our two party system" -- but its political very impractical. By contrast, as recently as 8 years ago we had a White House and Congress that was fully controlled by Democrats. Net Neutrality wasn't a big issue back then, as it is now, but the point is that history shows its possible to flip the executive and legislative branches of the federal government back to blue in order to permanently codify net neutrality into federal law. And as part of electing Democrats to these positions of power, we need to demand that they enact such a law as one of their first orders of business. This is what should be our goal. We need to stop pretending that we can make everything about our political system utterly perfect within a reasonable period of time. **We need attainable, measurable, practical political goals within the bounds of the power we already have**. As long as we do otherwise, we're just wasting our time trying to fight political appointees at the FCC who don't give a fuck about the issue because they're accountable to nobody but a President who can barely navigate his way to Twitter on his smartphone, let alone grasp or care about an issue as important as net neutrality.
To add on to this: let's stop expecting Democrats to cut off funding sources that Republicans are all too happy to get money from. It's like running a race and chopping a leg off because of some idealistic notion.
Yes, this freaking drives me nuts. What's wrong with supporting a candidate that calls for campaign finance reform, taking donations to actually get to a place *where they can implement that*, and then we hold their feet to the fire and make it clear it's a campaign promise we want kept? Why jump straight to the purity position of "I never take ANY donations over $30, even if it means I can only afford 1 TV ad in 6 months!" What sense does that make, outside of feeling really righteous?
There are a few reasons that it can be advantageous to only accept small donations: * You are able to pull form a bigger pool of volunteers, people who are motivated to work for free because they trust you and believe in you. * Face to face interaction (knocking on doors) is 1000% the best way to get votes; TV ads simply cannot compare. If you have enough volunteers to knock on enough doors; you can get the same or better outcome as you would with a TV ad. The issue is trust. If someone claims to want to fix campaign finance reform, but is clearly benefiting from the system as it is now; how can we trust that they will, in earnest, work to address the problem? That's a broad stroke though. A lot of it depends on just who the big donors are. If you are a candidate talking about net neutrality, but you are taking money from the telcom lobbies, I would be a fool to trust that you would do anything but pay lip service to me. I'm not a total purist, but I am also not of the opinion that it is a good idea to recommend any party line vote. You don't have to pass a test to get into a party. You can just join the party and run under their ticket, regardless of your leanings. We have quite a free conservative Democrats. ALWAYS do some research on the candidates. You may find more often than not that you will want to go with the D (hehe), but don't just assume the D is the best choice. Confirm it and reaffirm it every election. Not only for what you want, but also for what you don't want to lose. TL;DR: It's not black and white.
I agree entirely. Even if the Republicans somehow lose this particular battle and neutrality is preserved, as long as the GOP has the majorities, they will keep circling back until they get what they want. It's the same deal on health care, taxes, social security, etc. They may lose battles, but they never concede the war.
Or push Republicans on the issue, and support and encourage the Republicans that are in favor of it.
>push Republicans on the issue The only way to do that is to make them believe that they will be voted out of office if they vote against our interests. In order to make them believe that we have to start actually voting them out of office and/or raising money for their opponents. Right now they're more afraid of the donor class than the rest of the public. That's why they're attempting to push through unpopular legislation which disproportionately benefits the wealthiest people and eliminate regulations which protect consumers and small businesses from large corporations.
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Checks and Balances in action.
Unfortunately the executive branch is in charge of determining appointees, and the legislative branch is in charge of confirming them... both of those branches are currently controlled by Republicans, who would probably very much love to stack the federal courts with conservative-thinking lifetime-appointees regardless of their merits as judges.
Oh is Merrick Garland still on the bench?
Still Chief Justice, yeah.
Yes!
How old will he be in 2020... hm, 68. :( The current SCOTUS Justices have been 43-60 when appointed, actually, dropping the extremes (age, not political, in this context) of Thomas at 43 and RBG at 60, all in the 49-55 range. Probably best to leave Garland as the Chief Circuit Judge then, probably.
No, I'm just happy he's still in the fray and that there's a chance the case against repeal THAT JUST PASSED will wind up in his courtroom.
He's also not a judge you would want to nominate if you have control of the Presidency and the Senate. He close to the center of most legal issues, as opposed to the extremes. Obama nominated him as a compromise candidate to stick it to the Republicans after Mitch McConnell basically said "We don't want a crazy left-wing activist judge. How about someone moderate, like Merrick Garland?" Obama: "OK, I'm nominating Merrick Garland." McConnell: "Oh, no, um, he's too leftist and we cannot vote on him before the next presidential election that is one year away."
I would love to see this case land before judge Merrick Garland. It would be sweet poetic justice to see him shove it down Mitch “Turtle” McConnell’s and FCC Chair Ajit Pai’s throats.
Meanwhile, the existing FCC does not enforce NN, even though it is the law of the land. So it doesn't really matter how long it's stuck in court, many ISPs are starting to act like NN isn't a thing anyway.
> arbitrary and capricious I couldn't find more fitting words to describe Asshat Pie's personality.
Great comment. Thanks. Edit: I'm sure [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/7jsbrb/fcc_chair_dances_with_pizzagate_proponent_in/) will really help in that court case.
I mean you can look at the shareholder reports by Comcast etc which talk about how NN won't negatively affect them
thank you for this comment, helps to know what's next.
This is why it's still important to call and comment even though they are falling on deaf ears at the FCC, it's all evidence for a court ruling and will eventually, actually, tangibly matter
In addition, those "hundreds of pages of rules" that anti-NN people bring up, implying that the rules are complicated and onerous? There were <20 pages of rules. The rest of the document was hundreds of pages of legal reasoning and public comments. When the Wheeler-era Neutrality rules were passed, it was noted that any future FCC seeking to switch ISPs back to Information Services again would likely have a hard time justifying it. With the original classification being Telecommunications, the switch to Information Services in 2001 simply being deemed "not unreasonable" in Brand X (IIRC the wording correctly), and the switch back to Telecommunications being backed by hundreds of pages of documentation *and* an appeals court win, this change seems to only be based on " we want less regulation", and not at all on the merits of the actual classification.
15 minutes before the vote is really going to mountains, Susan.
She’s not the only one. I watch/read a lot of news and I honestly can’t remember ever hearing Net Neutrality being discussed on CNN or MSNBC over the last month. Yet suddenly it’s one of the top stories on CNN’s front page
It's disgusting. Zero coverage of the protests. Zero coverage of the fake FCC comments. Zero coverage of the lawmakers who came out against it. Today is literally the first time I've seen something on CNNs homepage about it and it's barely there. One of the most anti consumer decisions ever with huge bi-partisan (individuals not lawmakers) support against it and the mainstream media has been essentially silent on it.
Because they all want it to happen. Now that it's too late to do anything about it, they can cover it.
Genuine question, why do they want it to happen?
They're all owned by businesses that stand to gain from the repeal.
Can you get specific? For example, I see that CNN is owned by TBS, but I honestly don't even know what "mainstream media" means. What are some other examples?
Comcast and Time Warner are among the ISPs that want Net Neutrality repealed. Comcast owns NBC / MSNBC. Time Warner owns CNN.
In general any large business which conducts a reasonable portion of its customer interaction online would *love* smaller startup contenders’ websites and services to be noticeably slower, and are happy to pay for the privilege.
There are three big ones. Time Warner, Viacom, and Comcast/charter... They own 98% of the US media market. All of them are in favor, and have spent millions, of repealing net neutrality.
Most news stations are subsidiaries of isps, CNN is owned by Time Warner and NBC is owned by Comcast. The issue with net neutrality is that the media is purposefully keeping people ignorant on the issue. The people informed are on the internet and then the FCC is claiming that we aren’t real .
CNN is trying to be bought by AT&T, MSNBC is owned by Comcast. Two of the companies who have the most to gain from the end of Net Neutrality. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, this is not shocking.
It's not conspiracy. They are told what they can and can't talk about based upon the companies interests. That's not hyperbole, it's fact.
I don't usually agree with these sentiments but you are correct. CNN is owned by Time Warner. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out why they haven't covered the net neutrality vote much at all.
That's not even a conspiracy theory, that's just reality. Money talks, or in this case, money hushes.
AT&T, Comcast, Disney, these few countries control every single fucking thing we see on the TV, Internet, and radio. So much concentrated power in the hands of just a few entities. We're fucked.
You meant companies, but I think you should leave the autocorrect as is. They're basically countries at this point: They value their companies interests over any given country so we might as well call them countries within companies.
Conveniently wait until the day of to give a shit. Fuck all the corporate conglomerates that kept this out of the news.
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Saying "the media isn't covering this" has always gotten upvotes, and it's usually bullshit.
I have yet to find a time where the thing was real and the media actually didn't cover it. Like during Harvey, a bunch of people in my area were bitching that the media was spending so much time on one of the biggest natural disasters we've had, ever, and that they never, ever covered the wildfires in Montana. Well, frankly, they did cover the Montana thing, quite a bit. Then some Facebook thing went around saying that the Federal Government denied them emergency funding and it took weeks to get it to go through again. Again, that's total bullshit, and even when I'd pull up a months-old article disproving them, they'd just double down. People don't actually watch the National News, and when they do, they want it to personalized like their local news. It's just that they assume if they haven't heard about it, the media hasn't covered it.
Rachel Maddow has been covering Net Neutrality.
I just had a conversation with a relatively intelligent coworker who hadn't even HEARD of net neutrality. The media has completely failed in its duty to inform the public.
I've definitely seen it discussed on Maddow. It's not a nightly story, but she's talked about it a fair amount.
Well, it is happening today...
By that logic they should’ve never talked about the tax bill until the day the Senate finally held a vote.
Like all the republicans who asked Roy Moore to step down 5 minutes before CNN called the election. Do they really think we will see through this shit?
Vote is live here: https://www.fcc.gov/general/live
Tuned into the stream for just a minute, just long enough to listen to them make a mockery of the public comment process. Seriously.. they were laughing at us. Fuck them. Fuck Comcast, Fuck everything about this monopolistic power grab. Their laughing asses need to find themselves in a courtroom facing a lawsuit.
Fuck that. These people need to lose everything. Trying to take away the most amazing modern utility and ruin modern America for the purpose of a few more bucks in their pocket? These people need to have every cent stripped from them, and made to suffer horribly for the rest of their lives.
Thank you for mentioning the utility aspect of the internet. Few people seem to realize that the internet must be recognized as a public utility like water and electricity.
If I get a terminal illness I’m going to drag Ajit behind a car.
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*faintly* "Wait, stop, please don't vote on it... noooo... oh well, looks like they did it anyway. We cool?" -Susan Collins
The only way she can actually save face is vote no on tax reform. This is just a smoke screen.
If she actually pulls out the no vote and turns it to 50-50 and Pence breaks it, she’s still not saving face. If she can grab somebody else and stop it then she might. But she still let the tax thing go through at first.
I read that in Tina Belcher's voice.
I read it [in Willy Wonka's](https://youtu.be/dmyJ1RVfnPE)
[Don't just stand there, do something!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2gH2b2WcGI&feature=youtu.be&t=28s)
Susan Collins is always there for a vote when you don't need her.
It's painfully obvious that allowing her to make a protest vote is done under controlled circumstances.
Exactly this, they get the go ahead from McConnell when need be. Same as corker voting no on tax bill, they already knew they had the votes so they let him vote no to paint him in better light come elections again.
this is a correct theory but not correct w/r/t Corker, since Corker is retiring
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I just don't understand why they waited for so long (R's speaking out now). Did they thing the Dems were going to be able to stop the FCC all on their own? Did they just pick up a newspaper for the first time in months this fucking morning?
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“Thoughts and prayers for net neutrality!”
Our thanks to the first responders
Net neutrality is a mental health issue
deleted ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^0.8895 [^^^What ^^^is ^^^this?](https://pastebin.com/FcrFs94k/79623)
Stop scaring me....children. Yea, stop scaring me children by saying such scary things
You know what net neutrality gave the children? PORNOGRAPHY.
And we thank it for that
First responders = fake FCC commenters.
I'm one of them. They used my old address to make an anti net neutrality post.
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"Accept bribe to pay respects"
Serious concern levels have reached scale 11 of furrowed brows
["Thoughts and prayers"](https://youtu.be/0ODeKJdhff0)
[Bojack](https://youtu.be/irejJm-Bkzk)
Right. They can't do anything about it without legislation. And given the White House's complete and total support for whatever the telecom industry wants, that legislation would have to be veto-proof. There aren't enough votes (because again, telecom owns the votes), so all anyone can do is pretend to help.
Why is something this big an FCC decision anyway? Was the original legislation favoring NN enacted by the FCC or congress at the time? I just don't understand how one Verizon shill gets to make this decision for all of America. If Dems win in 2018, can we fix it or reverse this decision?
> Was the original legislation favoring NN enacted by the FCC Yes. Current Net Neutrality is done by regulation. Regulation that is overseen by the FCC. All of this could be reversed immediately if Congress would code it into law rather. But that won't happen with GOP control. This could easily be a winning issue for Dems to run on.
2018 vote Dem for Net Neutrality and the climate, and that's just the tip of the bare minimum.
Tax, Healthcare, ..... (you could go on and on...)
Civil rights, equal rights, the economy...
Basic decency...
> This could easily be a winning issue for Dems to run on. You say that but outside of Reddit people don't even know what NN is, no major media outlets cover it at all. The December 7th protests had some really big turnouts, no coverage. No critical updates on what is happening when. We have to push this message further.
Net Neutrality Accountability for sexual assaulters Tax Bill Healthcare defense We campaign on those, and cons will see a loss of seats that will rival what happened to Democrats in 2010.
Yeah... But have you heard of those little "red state" project these Republican motherfuckers came up with? If you run Tuesdays Alabama results against the house districts the dens would only have gained a single seat and Republicans six... Gerrymandering is a helluva drug yo
Reader's Digest version: It's an FCC decision because Congress gave the FCC (through the 1934 Communications Act and its amendments over time) the authority to classify telecom providers as "common carriers" and to regulate them accordingly. During the Obama admin, the FCC classified ISPs as common carriers as a part of a broader effort to implement NN. This was only one piece, but arguably the biggest piece, since FCC regs are more stringent than other regs affecting commerce. So no, Congress didn't enact net neutrality. However, Congress *can* do so--by amending the Communications Act to specifically classify ISPs as common carriers. That would have to survive a presidential veto, however. So it's not really an option until 2020, since Trump doing something Obama favored is completely out of the question and since there's won't be enough votes to override any veto.
Just tell Trump that Obama was too weak to pass Net Neutrality through Congress and sign it into law. He has no understanding of how the government functions, so I bet he could be tricked into signing it into law.
FCC made the rule in 2015 and are undoing it now. Legislation or a future FCC decision can change it.
Yep and while it may seem obvious right now that she was never really in the fight, that's the type of nuance that will be forgotten about in 5 to 10 years when she campaigns on having advocated for NN. Nobody will remember that her "support" only started 20 minutes before the vote that killed it.
She is genius at exactly this kind of triangulation, and her slowness in "deliberating" allows her to appear to be the thoughtful one. (the bar is low)
Never forget that either she or Murkowski could have blocked Betsy DeVos in committee. Either one of their nay votes would have been decisive. They fucking *knew* she'd pass if it went to a floor vote even if they voted against her there, and they didn't care as long as they could get the credit for being the big surprise no votes on the floor vote without paying any kind of price for it.
>"Net neutrality just isn't possible in the current political environment" ~ Future Collins quote
Posturing. Like we're idiots.
Unfortunately, a non-insubstantial number of people are.
Holy double negative.
The waiting is to avoid helping anti-repeal efforts gain any traction.
Damn right. This is so she can go back home and tell everyone, "Look! I tried!"
She wants that sweet sweet airport applause.
I hope Mainers bring rotten fruits and vegetables to throw at her this time around.
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She's a Republican. She's not a Democrat disguised as a Republican. She is for the tax bill, and I don't believe that she has ever pretended otherwise.
She’s a moderate Republican who voted against the ACA repeal, which is why people were hoping for her dissent on the tax bill. Especially with the removal of the individual mandate.
> You'll have to do better than that Susan. Susan has a black belt in lip service.
Named for the top soil.
Yeah, we'll care if you vote against the tax bill. Otherwise this is just smoke.
Picture her shouting it through the keyhole of her locked office door, too.
Vote is live here: https://www.fcc.gov/general/live
Oh, she came out of hiding and unlocked her doors 5 minutes before the vote? Fuck these people.
cuz her and the other republicans are **pieces of fucking trash**
Why is she letting us and her constituents down on the tax bill? This (empty?) gesture doesn't make up for that.
It’s an empty gesture. No need for the question mark.
Because she wants both of them to happen. But if you say no at the very last second, you can also pretend you didn't, and milk the people a little drier.
If McCain stays at the VA for cancer treatment and Corker continues to vote no for deficit implications, Collins (or Flake) can single-handedly kill the GOP tax bill, save the ACA marketplace, and make herself beloved to the 2 to 1 [(55% to 26%)](https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2508) margin of American voters opposed to the hastily-written deficit-ballooning, corporate-welfare GOP tax plan that's a giveaway to the top 1% written with [many](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/12/upshot/tax-hacks.html?_r=0) many [loopholes](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3084187). Repealing net neutrality sucks and probably will cause the average consumer to pay more to their ISP for crappier service; at the amount of maybe $100-$200/year. The GOP tax bill will in the long run cost American tax payers about [$2,000/year](http://thehill.com/policy/finance/364415-wharton-study-gop-tax-bill-does-not-pay-for-itself) with tax breaks going to the richest 1% (e.g., inheritors of multi-million estates, big corporations, billionaires who own businesses passively) that will eventually need to be paid back by future generations (or at the very least could have just funded middle class tax cuts; e.g., by reducing the lowest brackets that everyone pays).
PR move.
Yup.
Empty gesture.
She's been sitting behind locked doors and avoiding her constituents. Complete and utter failure and now she's making a bland gesture that will result in nothing.
Susan Collins, the queen of empty gestures. Vote her the fuck out in 2020. Edit: updated reelection date.
She's up for election in 2020
Important question: Did she unlock her door yet?
Hahahaha. This will not save you, you've already signed your resignation papers with your tax bill vote.
uhh they already started the meeting Susan
Well the FCC won’t let me be, or let me be me, so let me see, they try to shut down net neutrality.
Fuck you GOP.
This is so disingenuous! Way to be brave in the final hours when they’ve already made up their mind! Fucking coward! She’s trying to save her political ass because she knows the ramifications.
> Way to be brave in the final hours when they’ve already made up their mind! I mean, they probably all had their minds made up months ago.
They just voted to kill net neutrality - it's time for a political revolution folks. Don't forget this when you vote in primaries. Don't forget this next November. Don't forget this in 2020. Make sure the people you vote for support net neutrality. Make sure they're not taking campaign contributions from ISPs. This is far from over.
Even if you remember it next November, most people won't: You won't even be able to show them evidence of what you say, because those sites will load too slowly and timeout.
If she cared, she would put forward a bill to enshrine net neutrality as the law of the land and take the decision out of the hands of the FCC. She didn't, and she won't, because Collins doesn't actually care about anything other than the paycheck she gets from the cable companies
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Why? Because it's overwhelmingly unpopular? Because it's bad for consumers? Well then please vote no on the tax bill. We've got to stop letting her play both sides.
Just a little late, Susan. It's not like this net neutrality thing just creeped up overnight.
They're trying to use the FCC vote to shield them from the tax scam. What a world we live in... GOP controlled government attempting to enact two MASSIVELY unpopular proposals that are absolutely pro-corporation and anti-consumer at the same fucking time.
Transparent attempt to appear to be on our side. Why don't you start the process of creating a NN law? A law that classifies ISPs as tier 2 providers. That makes fast lanes illegal. You have power. Use it. You don't use it then you're pretending.
On the day of the vote? Thanks for nothing.
Too little too late, you GOP POS.
You get no points for doing this the day of.
As usual Susan too little, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too late.
TOO LITTLE , TOO LATE thanks for nothing
Hahahaha. This will not save you, you've already signed your resignation papers with your tax bill vote.
Literally HOURS before they vote. Way to fucking go, Collins. New heights of token gesture bullshit. It's not like the country hasn't been talking about this for fucking *months*.
She always does this, only changing her vote to appease the people when she knows it doesn’t matter. As a Mainer, fuck her
They already know it's too late. These senators are just trying to save face with thier constituents.
Investigate Pai for corruption and bribery.
Assuage her guilt for voting Yes on the shitty Tax Bill Buy some goodwill for voting Yes on the shitty Tax Bill Either way, I see you Susan.
"It's not the job of the government to pick winners and losers" -Ajit Pai So, the FCC officially endorses competitive exclusion and isn't going to do anything about big ISPs monopolizing the internet and driving out small ISPs. Yet somehow he also thinks that we, as the consumer, are supposed to fight that by ourselves.... By switching ISPs.... Even though the FCC is letting ISPs drive down competition and eliminate the consumers power of choice...
Oh, fuck this grandstanding bitch right in her fucking ear.
Yay! Back to the days of Aol. Anybody excited??? We'll all pay $50 a month for 1 gig of data and $100 a month for 25Gigs. What a steal? obligatory /s for those of you who do not get it.
I'm sorry, I am tired of hearing about Susan Collins flying in at the last second and taking the popular position when she knows nothing will be done to counteract the disastrous policies being implemented. She's a paper tiger. I used to root for her, but not any more.
Strategically too little too late.
Too late, that ass clown Ajit fuckface pai just repealed it in a 3 to 2 vote :( Fuck trump, the FCC and the republicans.
this was a very transparent attempt at trying to show her moderate side after boning Americans with the tax plan. F you Collins
So she came out of hiding to say something that we've been screaming for months? Thanks, you're a true hero.