So It's Not Really about Net Neutrality

Last week the Federal Communications Commission issued a ruling that rolled back a 2015 (i.e., Obama-era, and therefore stupid) edict in regard to a concept called "net neutrality."  Naturally, the left and the press (but I repeat myself) howled that the Internet as we know it was gone forever, that women and children and old people would die, and California would no longer be a good place.

Jimmy Kimmel, whose platform is that he has a very late-night talk show, called the chairman of the FCC a bad name, which the left tends to do, in the interim while it's trying to dig up women the person has treated badly in the last 60 years, or it can't actually make an argument and has given up logic.

I confess that I do not have a handle on what "net neutrality" actually means, but please don't write a comment explaining it.  What I do understand is that it was a concept wrapped in a nice-sounding title, that had forbidden Internet service providers from adjusting the speed or other attributes of services that certain entities provided.

We understand that removing net neutrality was bad for Google and Apple and other left-coast companies, and it's good for some others.

But it really does not matter.  I don't really care whom it helps or hurts.  The key three-letter organization that does matter is the FCC itself. 

Back in 2015, Obama's FCC voted to impose this net neutrality posture as a regulation with the force of law.  And that, friends, is where I have a problem with it.  When Donald Trump became President Trump, one of the reasons we voted him in was to "drain the swamp", and one of the drainage methods he was going to use, was to delete reams of superfluous regulations.

His pledge, in fact, was to delete two regulations for every one new one that was issued, and if there is one pledge he has carried out, that's the one -- I think I heard today that 22 regulations had been dumped for every one that has been added since Inauguration Day.

But let's get to the purpose of that pledge.  We have three branches of government, as everyone but the people Jesse Watters interviews on the streets and campuses of New York knows.  The Executive branch is intended to run the government, to operate the departments and agencies that are created, funded and overseen by the Legislative branch, which solely has the authority under the Constitution to create law.

The analogy here is the DACA situation, where President Trump removed an executive order that created DACA, claiming it was not in Obama's purview to "make law", and gave Congress six months to pass an actual DACA law to deal with the children of illegal immigrants.  He didn't say that he was against DACA; just that the authority to establish such a program belonged to Congress, and if they wanted to pass a DACA law, he would respect it and, I assume, likely sign it.

The Constitution did not create the FCC, of course.  It gave Congress the power to create agencies such as the FCC, but it did not empower Congress to delegate its lawmaking role to an Executive branch agency that it had created.  Net neutrality is a law, to the extent that it enforceably allows or disallows certain actions, and it's pretty clear that decisions on a law's existence need to come from the Capitol and not the White House.

I can't really say that President Trump cared one way or the other about net neutrality and, to be clear, I'm not sure if the actions of the FCC in dumping it were meant to direct Congress to make a decision on net neutrality for the FCC to follow.  I truly hope both the FCC and the president indeed felt that way.

But I'm a fan of most any circumstance where an Executive branch agency drops a regulation that it came up with, and obliges Congress to do its job and make law, if it decides that there should be one.  If not, it is not for the FCC, or HUD, or OSHA or the CFPB, to make up law in the absence of one.  The Constitution was fairly clear about those roles, and so am I.

So -- I ask President Trump, regardless of why his FCC ended net neutrality, to make a public statement associating net neutrality with DACA as precisely the type of law that must come from Congress or not exist at all.  Executive agencies have over-regulated the USA and created a nanny state that will be hard to dismantle.  But the argument is not over net neutrality but over Government bureaucrat overreach and Congress's assertion of its own role.

If the president can make it clear that actions like this are intended to restore the balance of powers and the proper role of the three branches, at least he will have the high road.

Maybe even Jimmy Kimmel might -- just might -- understand.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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