Supreme Court Rejects Challenge To FCC Broadband Subsidy Program (nbcnews.com) 58
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that the FCC's Universal Service Fund can continue operating, rejecting claims that the program's funding mechanism violates the Constitution. In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Elena Kagan, the court found that Congress did not exceed its authority when it enacted the 1996 law establishing the fund and that the FCC could delegate administration to a private corporation. The Universal Service Fund subsidizes telecommunications services for low-income consumers, rural health care providers, schools and libraries through fees generally passed on to customers that raise billions of dollars annually.
The program is administered by the Universal Service Administrative Company, a nonprofit the FCC designated to run the fund. Conservative advocacy group Consumers' Research challenged the structure, arguing that "a private company is taxing Americans in amounts that total billions of dollars every year, under penalty of law, without true governmental accountability."
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Consumers' Research, prompting the FCC to petition the Supreme Court for review. Kagan wrote that Congress "sufficiently guided and constrained the discretion that it lodged with the FCC to implement the universal-service contribution scheme," adding that the FCC "retained all decision-making authority within that sphere." She concluded that "nothing in those arrangements, either separately or together, violates the Constitution." The challengers argued the program violates the "nondelegation doctrine," a conservative legal theory that says Congress has limited powers to delegate its lawmaking authority to the executive branch.
The program is administered by the Universal Service Administrative Company, a nonprofit the FCC designated to run the fund. Conservative advocacy group Consumers' Research challenged the structure, arguing that "a private company is taxing Americans in amounts that total billions of dollars every year, under penalty of law, without true governmental accountability."
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Consumers' Research, prompting the FCC to petition the Supreme Court for review. Kagan wrote that Congress "sufficiently guided and constrained the discretion that it lodged with the FCC to implement the universal-service contribution scheme," adding that the FCC "retained all decision-making authority within that sphere." She concluded that "nothing in those arrangements, either separately or together, violates the Constitution." The challengers argued the program violates the "nondelegation doctrine," a conservative legal theory that says Congress has limited powers to delegate its lawmaking authority to the executive branch.
Connected zero homes program? (Score:5, Funny)
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I dunno, but your description sounds typical for a govt program.
Re:Connected zero homes program? (Score:5, Interesting)
No one can waste public money quite like large, private companies do. Come to that they are often quite wasteful in general, often because of the lack of competition.
Broadband companies took the money and without oversight did essentially nothing for it, or at best complied maliciously with the regulation accompanying the money.
Government programs always need fairly costly oversight because of how greedy people really are. Private companies, on the other hand, can be just as wasteful when they are taking consumers money. So either way you do it, there are problems. That doesn't mean government programs are inherently bad or necessarily inefficient, nor is government. In fact they are quite necessary generally for a cohesive society. Getting the balance right is something no one has yet done.
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Government programs always need fairly costly oversight because of how greedy people really are.
It is very easy to spend other people's money...
Which is exactly you need stringent oversight whenever a private entity manages a public project with public funds.
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And who pays when a startup fails?
Tax payers.
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Getting the balance right is something no one has yet done.
There is no balance. There is homeostasis, which is kind of a balance, but not really. Letting money grow into large pools, larger pools than the government itself manages, is a surefire way to destabilize homeostasis (government in this case).
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I’ll make you a deal. Let’s do away with this and your social security and medicare. Will you take it?
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I’ll make you a deal. Let’s do away with this and your social security and medicare. Will you take it?
Absolutely!! End that shit NOW!!
Re: Connected zero homes program? (Score:2)
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Maybe it just wasn't funny.
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Is this the FCC program that has connected zero homes to the internet but had all of it's money wasted?
I think this is more the program that allows low-income homes to qualify for a reduced (~$30 discount) rate for broadband service that is already established, currently managed under the guise of a "non-profit".
From the sounds of it Consumers' Research knows damn well what that legally means in America today; as low as 35% of the gross revenue actually going towards the very thing the non-profit exists for, while funding non-profit administrators/executives a healthy six-figure salary to administrate all th
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What do we think non-profit actually means. Are you really thinking non-profit means the individuals don't make money? Is this is a serious question?
Also if the fund is $4.5B annually is it really so unreasonable to pay some "6-figure" ($100k? $800k?) salaries to admin it?
Also where is you source for that 35% because from the FCC report here it seems like their admin fees are $68M for over $2B in funds so right around 3% or maybe you have different info
Proposed First Quarter 2025 Universal Service Contribu [fcc.gov]
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How about we give the ISPs a huge tax break to fund doing this themselves? Surely we can trust them to do the right thing? We'll have some congressional review to keep them honest... /sarcasm.
So... lets use a private for-profit corporation to handle this?? With higher CEO and admin salaries plus obviously a minimum 30% profit margin just to be a profitable business; plus endless schemes to extract increased profits.
Some classes of non-profits should have higher % donated than others; but unlike a private co
Re:Connected zero homes program? (Score:5, Informative)
Is this the FCC program that has connected zero homes to the internet but had all of it's money wasted?
No it's not. You're talking about the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. This is the Universal Service Fund (USF). You can read about it here if you're actually interested in what it is for https://www.fcc.gov/general/un... [fcc.gov]. Though I suspect you're not.
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I mean I care enough to read this slashdot post
How do we know that? You say you know what BEAD is but you confused it with USF, I'm not actually sure you read the post, I think you just commented.
That said it seems like you are more concerned about imagined outcomes than what's actually happening with these ridiculous programs...
I have zero skin in the game. It's neither my taxes nor my country. But thanks for playing.
Re: They also undermined birthright citizenship (Score:4, Insightful)
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No they didn't. The related case before the court was not about birthright citizenship. It was about universal injunctions.
The birthright citizenship case is still being adjudicated. The injunction in this case is no longer nationwide.
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So all this time Biden could have enacted student loan forgiveness.
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Biden tried to forgive student loans
SCOTUS: "Whoa there buddy, uh, major questions anyone? Can't do it"
Trump revokes part of USC
SCOTUS: "Obviously he gets the benefit of the doubt."
The court can't stop Trump anymore (Score:2)
Before this ruling the court could rule that Trump cannot deport people who are citizens and it would apply across the board.
You have to realize that Trump is abusing the legal system. If you give him and project 2025 an inch they will take a mile.
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Persons not born in the United States acquire citizenship by birth only as provided by Acts of Congress. At the time of Thomas’s birth, Congress extended birthright citizenship to children born abroad to one citizen parent and one alien parent, as long as the citizen parent met certain physical-presence requirements. His father was a naturalized United States citizen serving in the Uni
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Which apparently changed in 2020 [military.com].
In a statement, Duckworth said the new law will make sure that children born while stationed abroad, as well as stepchildren and adopted children, will automatically acquire U.S. citizenship.
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And if that doesn't terrify you it should.
The only thing that terrifies me is people like you who have no idea what's going on and yet make public proclamations about a topic. The Supreme Court has not ruled on birthright citizenship in any way shape or form. They made a ruling on the ability to apply wide reaching injunctions in lower courts, and additionally also stayed their own ruling for 30 days to give people who want to debate the illegality of what the Trumptator is doing the ability to file it in the correct court.
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Ruling on birthright citizenship would have required them to defend it against the constitution, which they knew they would never be able to do since it would be blatantly unconstitutional.
Today's ruling is a disgusting, corrupt workaround with even wider ranging ramifications.
So they have taken away a fundamental tool (Score:1)
Donald Trump and the project 2025 goons running the show behind him are fully intending to use this ruling to negate birthright citizenship.
It does not matter what the law says. Trump can just deport people, including you, and unless you are very well off or you happen to wonder into national attention you are in for a world of hurt.
That wasn't true before this ruling. In the past
Winning! (Score:1)
Should have been rejected on procedural grounds (Score:2)
Laches comes to mind. If it takes you twenty-nine years to decide that you think a program is unconstitutional, you have lost your right to litigate.
This was very clearly a "We don't like this, and we're going to try to find a way to strike it down in court so that the courts get blamed instead of us" move. All but three of the supreme court justices saw through it as a transparently obvious political ploy.
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Yeah, no. Laches is applied to issues involving various other parties with respect to damages for injuries inflicted. It doesn't apply to questions of whether a law is constitutional.
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Yeah, no. Laches is applied to issues involving various other parties with respect to damages for injuries inflicted. It doesn't apply to questions of whether a law is constitutional.
The doctrine is not nearly as narrow as you seem to believe. In fact, it isn't generally applied to damage situations at all, and is primarily concerned with the impact of an injunction.
You're probably thinking of patent cases, where it can be an affirmative defense against patent claims [cornell.edu]. However, the reason for it being an affirmative defense is not because the damages resulting from the lawsuit would have increased over time, but rather because the company ostensibly violating the patent would have beco
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If a law is unconstitutional, it does not matter how long it takes for that fact to be determined, it does not suddenly become constitutional by default.
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If a law is unconstitutional, it does not matter how long it takes for that fact to be determined, it does not suddenly become constitutional by default.
Ostensibly, but realistically, if the law were unconstitutional, it stands to reason that someone would have sued over it almost three decades ago, so the burden of proof required to argue against its constitutionality is basically insurmountably huge after so many years of no one doing so.
The only plausible grounds for arguing unconstitutionality after so long would be if there were new information that did not exist at the time, e.g. if you were able to collect statistics from a generation of people livin
Re:Supreme Court is Corrupt to the Core (Score:4, Interesting)
That is crazy. Which is exactly what the majority opinion was so critical of Jackson's dissent. There is nothing constitutional at all about a District court judge preventing the executive from taking action against complainants not before them. There was no history of first rung judge halting policy beyond their regional jurisdiction in US law or common law prior to 20th century either.
They even carved out the case of class action suits, that could still result in nation wide injunctions. District judges don't deal with broad questions of law appellate courts and the Supreme court do.
The Constitution establishes three co-equal branches of government, there was nothing equal or little 'd' democratic about one judge being able to cause the policy choices of the other two branches to be brought to a screeching halt. All the present system did is enable agitators to go shopping for venues where advancing their pet legal theories are most likely to succeed. Conservatives and liberals alike have played these stupid games and it was long past time to put a stop to that nonsense.
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There's an argument to be made there but after years of district judges, most infamously the Northern District of Texas’s Matthew Kacsmaryk, blocking Biden policies on a nationwide basis, it’s five months into the second Trump administration that the high court decides to limit the practice. How convenient.
This is not about that. At all.
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Whose fault isn't that liberals didn't raise this same question to SCOTUS, and instead waited for conservatives to do so?
The court can't rule on an issue that nobody brings forth.
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Whose fault isn't that liberals didn't raise this same question to SCOTUS, and instead waited for conservatives to do so?
We all know how the court would rule.
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It's funny how people are all about "the democratic process" unless it produces outcomes they don't like.
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Whose fault
The conservatives who abused the practice until it was no longer convenient for them. Two wrongs don't make a right buddy.
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There is nothing constitutional at all about a District court judge preventing the executive from taking action against complainants not before them. .
Except when a democrat does it.
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Well, that is one way to view it. Another way is that an "executive order" (I refuse to capitalize these monstrous things) can take away every single Right that the Bill of Rights reserves for you and then YOU personally have to fight it... and that precedent will NOT apply to anyone else if you win back your rights.
In essence, only the wealthy and powerful will have Rights... at least until the supreme court (spit) speaks on the issue. Possibly decades down the line... or never.
If you treat anyone unfairly
Aproportioned Tax? (Score:2)
Maybe most people pay this but not everybody does so it's not aproportioned.
It's clearly not a tax on incomes either.
Non-delegation was a dumb strategy, sorry.