116th US Congress are dirty commies

You might think that Congress has more important issues on its hands, with a
pandemic still going on, issues around disinformation and the election,
massive fires still burning in parts of the US, a record number of
hurricanes pounding the south... but it appears that Congress thinks the
most pressing issue is gutting Section 230. As you'll recall, right after
FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly made some generally straightforward
statements about how the 1st Amendment wouldn't let the government interfere
with social media platforms, Trump informed O'Rielly that his nomination to
stay at the FCC had been rescinded.

It seems pretty clear that in the world of Trump, all that he wants out of
his FCC is to act as his own private speech police. To that effect, he not
only put in place the obviously unconstitutional executive order pushing
NTIA to petition the FCC to "reinterpret" Section 230 of the Communications
Act -- the law that enables social media to exist in its current form -- but
has since put pressure on the FCC to move forward with that effort. While
some had hoped that maybe Ajit Pai would find a backbone and his long-stated
principles in his giant Reese's mug, he has proven he has neither, and moved
forward with the process to make the FCC the internet speech police.

Of course, there remains a problem. O'Rielly is still there, and both the
Democrats on the FCC have made it clear they disagree with this plan. When
the announcement was made that O'Rielly's nomination had been pulled, I
heard from multiple FCC experts who told me there was "no way" that a new
Commissioner could be nominated, vetted, paraded before the Senate, and
voted on before January 20th. However, it appears that a Senate that has
decided it can rush through a candidate for an open Supreme Court seat
rather than deal with the actual problems of the country can also do the
exact same thing for an FCC Commissioner.

Last month, Trump nominated the guy who wrote the unconstitutional executive
order, Nathan Simington, to the seat, and again I was told that his
nomination was unlikely to be reviewed by the Senate before the new session
began next year. Not so, apparently. As Politico reported last week, the
Senate Commerce Committee has agreed to rush through his nomination in "near
record time" with a hearing set for November 10th.

It's going to be fascinating to watch all those Senators who spent years
claiming they were absolutely, 100% against the FCC regulating anything to
do with the internet do total 180s and make sure that Simington is ready to
become the speech police for the internet.