Redistricting Blamed for House Commerce, Judiciary Committee Losses in California

Elsewhere, Republican Charles Bass, on the House Commerce Committee and Communications Subcommittee, lost his New Hampshire race to Ann McLane Kuster, a Democratic lawyer. Three other Republican seats on the House Commerce Committee were vacated when Sue Myrick of North Carolina announced her retirement, while Cliff Stearns of Florida and John Sullivan of Oklahoma lost their primary races earlier this year. Four other Democratic seats on the House Commerce Committee were vacated by the retiring Edolphus Towns of New York, Mike Ross of Arkansas and Jay Inslee, who announced his retirement in March to run for Washington governor. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin retired from the House and won the Senate seat held by the retiring Herb Kohl, D-Wisc.

Following the elections, there are now eight vacant seats on the House Commerce Committee, with two races that were yet to be decided at our deadline. There are three vacant seats on the House Judiciary Committee, with one race yet to be decided. In the Senate, there are two vacant seats on the Commerce Committee, and two on Judiciary.

Though Bono Mack had not yet conceded defeat, Republicans were already raising questions about who would replace her as Commerce Subcommittee on Manufacturing chairman. She is also a member of the House Communications Subcommittee. Outgoing Rep. Ben Quayle, R-Ariz., told us Wednesday the Republican Steering Committee (RSC) will begin holding initial meetings next week to determine who will take any vacant subcommittee leadership seats. The process will take weeks and subcommittee leadership positions will be finalized in mid-December, he said. An RSC spokesman didn’t comment. Bono Mack was a strong conservative voice against net neutrality and authored House Continuing Resolution 127 supporting attempts to preserve “the multistakeholder governance model under which the Internet has thrived.” Bono Mack also sought more protection and transparency for how companies handle consumer data, sponsored the House version of the Republican SECURE IT cybersecurity bill (HR-4263) and worked to stem the spread of spam, spyware and Internet fraud.

California voters recently passed a redistricting ballot initiative to update the state’s gerrymandering and a ballot initiative to change the way primary voting works, said ITIF Research Fellow Richard Bennett. So the state’s primary voters could choose from the two candidates with the highest primary totals, regardless of their party. “The new California nominating process favors moderates who can rise above their party labels. It remains to be seen how this affects policy, but its impact on elections is huge,” said Bennett. “The Berman/Sherman race was all down to redistricting,” he said. “The district was mainly Sherman’s turf, and he'd been in office long enough to have good name [recognition] there.” Berman leaves a hole on the House Judiciary Committee as the No. 2 ranking Democrat and an advocate for intellectual property rights as one of the original sponsors of the Stop Online Piracy Act (HR-3261). “Losing Berman and Bono Mack is clearly a setback for the creative community in Washington,” said Paul Gallant, Guggenheim Securities analyst. “Those members have been very effective players in support of policies supported by content creators."

Lungren hadn’t conceded by our deadline, and his campaign spokesman said there are “tens of thousands of absentee and provisional ballots still to be counted, and we may not know the outcome of this race for days or even weeks,” according to local news reports. As House Cybersecurity Subcommittee chairman, Lungren is a strong technology advocate who was not shy to criticize SOPA for what he said was undermining other legislative efforts to secure the Web. During the Spring Cyberweek markups, House Republican leaders steamrolled Lungren’s PRECISE Act (HR-3674), which aimed to create baseline cybersecurity guidelines for owners and operators of critical infrastructure. Republicans lost three House Judiciary Committee members from the 112th congress, Elton Gallegly of California who announced his retirement this year; Sandy Adams of Florida and Quayle, who each lost renomination in separate primary defeats.

Quayle said Lungren, Bono Mack and Bilbray became victims to post-Census redistricting that “carved up” their electorate in a way that became more Democratic. “The way that California is shifting, it is hard for Republicans to win out there,” he said. “You are going to see probably a shrinking even more of the Republican candidates and congressional representation in California, just because of the way the state has shifted in such a dramatic fashion."

California became an “orphan state” for House Republicans who suffered Tuesday from meager voter turnout efforts from committee leadership, said Quayle. National GOP party leaders didn’t spend as much attention on the Golden State, he said, because their presidential candidate, former Governor Mitt Romney, was generally disfavored in the state polls. Republicans “had an uphill battle, and had to focus all of their internal resources” without more help from their party, Quayle said. “There wasn’t going to be that help from the Republican Party, because obviously California was going to go to President Obama,” said Quayle. “Those are the things I think we probably should have focused on and I don’t know what the [National Republican Congressional Committee] NRCC was doing on that. When they are not going to have that kind of support, the NRCC really needs to step up.” An NRCC spokesman provided data that said the committee spent a total of $10.3 million in campaign funding for California districts 7, 9, 10, 24, 26, 36 and 52. That compared to $62 million the committee spent throughout the U.S. in this election cycle, he said.

House Commerce Committee and Communications Subcommittee incumbents’ losses won’t have any major influence on telecom policy in the 113th Congress, said Rick Boucher, who lost his Democratic seat in Virginia in 2010 and until then was subcommittee chairman. “From a leadership perspective, not a lot changes,” he said. The only threat to a leadership post in either committee came from House Commerce Committee Ranking Member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who narrowly escaped defeat from his challenger Bill Bloomfield, an Independent.

New GOP Senate Commerce Leadership

The Senate Commerce Committee is preparing for a new ranking member in the 113th Congress. Industry sources said it could be the tea party-aligned Republican from South Carolina, Jim DeMint. Though the Senate arithmetic has dashed his hopes of becoming Commerce Committee Chairman, industry executives said his chances are looking good to become the committee’s next ranking member.

DeMint is next in line after the retirement of Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. Republicans vote to select their ranking members, and could theoretically choose someone else, an industry source said. It’s “very, very hard” to break with the traditional seniority hierarchy in the Senate, said another Republican source. “My sense is that if DeMint wants this, he can have it.” If DeMint is selected by his colleagues to become the top Republican on the committee, he plans to free up more spectrum for carriers, remove unnecessary telecom law and ensure the FCC is not “preemptively” regulating the industry, he told us in September (CD Sept 25 p1). A spokesman for the Senate Republican Conference wouldn’t say when Senate members select leadership positions for GOP committee posts, but said it will likely occur “sometime during the lame-duck Congress."

DeMint would make an “outstanding” ranking member on Senate Commerce, Seton Motley, president of Less Government, said by email. “He has repeatedly expressed his uber-informed, correct assessment that the Tech sector is a fundamental part of our economy. And that it needs less regulation and updated, light-touch legislation. May his way win the day.” Boucher is unsure if DeMint would seek to exhume the issue of net neutrality, he said. “It’s opening a can of worms, and would be a messy debate to say the least."

Commerce Committee Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Claire McCaskill of Missouri won reelection in competitive Midwestern races. Klobuchar, on the Commerce and Judiciary committees, defeated Republican State Representative Kurt Bills. She’s the author of the Cloud Computing Act (S-3569) and the Commercial Felony Streaming Act (S-978). McCaskill stumped her Republican opponent Todd Akin, after his campaign was set back by his highly publicized comments about abortion and what he called forcible rape.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., won his race against Republican opponent Connie Mack, son of Nelson’s predecessor in the battleground state. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., beat her challenger, Republican State Sen. Michael Baumgartner.

Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev, held a narrow lead over his Democratic challenger, Rep. Shelley Berkley, a former casino lawyer and advocate for online gambling reform. Heller, a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, was appointed in May of 2011 to fill the seat vacated by former Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., in the wake of Ensign’s sex scandal allegations. Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., trounced his Democratic opponent Albert Gore.

There were no electoral surprises for Senate Judiciary members running for reelection. Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein D-Calif., and Sheldon Whitehouse D-R.I., emerged victorious on election night, as did Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. It wasn’t immediately clear whom Senate leaders would select to fill the two seats vacated by the retiring Kohl and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

It’s unlikely any telecom-related legislation will be negotiated in the lame duck, industry sources said. Instead, the focus for Congress over the next two months will be on a collection of fiscal legislative matters commonly referred to as the “fiscal cliff.” Between Dec. 31 and Jan. 2, the President George W. Bush-era tax cuts, payroll tax cuts, emergency unemployment benefits and alternative minimum tax exemption will all expire and sequestration will kick in. A month later, Congress will again have to consider raising the federal debt ceiling or face another potential credit downgrade, and in March the six-month continuing resolution which is currently funding federal agencies will expire.

When Obama and Senate leaders meet with House Republican leaders this month to hash out a compromise, expect Democrats to “drive a hard bargain,” said a Republican lobbyist. “The scope of yesterday’s victory -- up and down the board -- the presidency, the Senate, even a little bit in the House and at the ballot initiative level -- I think all of that will embolden Democrats to drive a very hard bargain over course of the next month or two,” he said. Minority Media and Telecommunications Council Executive Director David Honig, co-chair of Telecom Lawyers for Obama-Biden, predicted little Capitol Hill action on big communications issues in the immediate future. “What the next two, or four, years of divided government will do is make it somewhat daunting for Congress to undertake FCC reform as part of -- or apart from -- a comprehensive rewrite of the Telecom Act,” he said.

"The president won a resounding re-election victory on many scores,” said Matt Wood, Free Press policy director. “But as usual, what we really need now are lawmakers in both parties doing their best to craft media and tech policies that serve the public interest, not just corporate interests or partisan aims. We hope the administration will continue the good work its started in some areas, like shared spectrum. We need it to make good on the promise of net neutrality and Internet freedom, broadband competition and adoption, media diversity and accountability, and a host of other tasks still very much in progress on the Hill and at the FCC.

Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld expects a busy legislative agenda next year. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski “has learned that a Republican House cannot do much when countered by a Democratic Senate,” Feld said. “If the yardstick is ‘will Congress revisit the 1996 Act,’ then yes, nothing will happen. If the yardstick is, ‘is this going to be a very dynamic time in telecom when stuff actually gets done,’ then I predict we will all be very busy."

Though he was a vocal Romney supporter, CEA President Gary Shapiro is “optimistic about the next four years,” he told us Wednesday. Of 38 House and Senate candidates that CEA’s CEAPAC contributed to, “we had 30 wins and two are too close to call,” Shapiro said. That’s “a pretty good winning percentage for a political action committee,” he said.

Shapiro was an “enthusiastic” Romney backer because he thinks the Republican candidate would have made “an incredibly frugal, competent, experienced” president, he said. Romney was “the first presidential candidate in my lifetime I've been really excited about, and he’s squeaky clean,” Shapiro said. “You'll never get a cleaner candidate than him."

One day after the election, Shapiro doesn’t think CEA “is any different” from any other Washington-based industry lobbying group in reacting to the outcome, he said: “Virtually every business group was supporting Romney.” Like most such groups, we're “disappointed in the sense that we want a president who understands and appreciates business,” he said. “But we did not get that.” Still, Shapiro thinks CE is “better off than other industries because the Obama White House has been fairly friendly to technology,” he said.

In terms of the House, “I think we're fine,” Shapiro said of CEA’s legislative agenda for the new Congress. For CEA, Shapiro said, one House highlight was the defeat in California’s San Fernando Valley of Rep. Howard Berman in a Democratic-only redistricting faceoff against Rep. Brad Sherman. Berman, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, “was known as the motion picture industry candidate, and he lost, not that I was rooting for him to lose,” he said. However, on copyright and intellectual property issues, Berman “was always against us,” Shapiro said. CEA had “no Senate losses,” except in those cases where CEAPAC contributed to both candidates in a contest, he said.

CEA has high hopes for passage in the new Congress of legislation that died mid-September in the House that would re-allocate 55,000 green cards to foreign-born graduates with advanced degrees in science, tech, engineering and math, Shapiro said. When the world’s top foreign students receive their degrees from U.S. universities, current law forces them “to the back of the visa line,” he wrote in a recent essay. “Many leave reluctantly, but once back in their native countries they do what we don’t let them do here: innovate, create jobs and build businesses, which then compete with U.S. companies."

The legislation failed to clear the House because “there were a lot of politics involved, and we hope to get past that,” Shapiro told us. Obama and House Democrats opposed it because they have said they would only support changing the law as part of wider immigration reform, which Obama didn’t tackle in his first term, he said. CEA thinks it likely that the House Judiciary chairmanship will go to Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., Shapiro said, “and he’s considered more likely to negotiate with the Democrats on this issue” than the committee’s outgoing chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas. “Republicans and Democrats want this to happen,” he said. “They say the same words ... they just have to act on it and it requires some compromise."

Other issues impacting the tech industry before the new Congress “are bigger,” and more complicated, Shapiro said. For example, CEA members want to see more “certainty in taxes,” he said, “and that requires bipartisan work.” Obama’s re-election leaves Shapiro “less optimistic” about the prospects of enacting “repatriation” tax reform, “but you never know,” he said. Major CEA member companies like Audiovox and Microsoft have “a lot of money sitting parked overseas, and they can’t bring it back here because it will be taxed at a very high rate, the highest in the world,” he said. “There’s a compromise there that hopefully President Obama will take in which you can bring that money back if you invest it in some infrastructure bank or in capital resources or in hiring people.” Shapiro thinks that’s one compromise “that’s there for the taking,” he said. Unfortunately, he said, organized labor “is very much against that.”