40 Groups Push for 'End of March' for Sohn's Senate Confirmation
Fight for the Future and 39 other groups urged the Senate Thursday to confirm FCC nominee Gigi Sohn “before the end of March,” saying “there are several things that the FCC could do to protect the safety and rights of…
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people seeking, providing, and facilitating abortion care. But they can’t do any of them until the commission is fully staffed” with a 3-2 Democratic majority. Sohn, whom President Joe Biden renominated in January, is to testify at a Tuesday Senate Commerce Committee confirmation hearing (see 2302080043). It will be her third appearance before the panel, after the Senate stalled on confirming her in 2021 and 2022. “The Biden administration’s priorities, including restoring net neutrality and enacting privacy rules, have stalled for over two years,” the pro-Sohn groups said. “In that time, telecom giants and Big Tech have only scaled up their collection and retention of an astonishingly unnecessary amount of customer data, including the locations and search histories of individual people.” The Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson last year, which overturned the existing Roe v. Wade finding of a constitutional right to abortion, means the U.S.’ “lack of constitutional privacy protections now enables the mass-scale tracking and criminalization of those seeking abortion healthcare,” the groups said: “Location data from cell phones can be used as evidence to prosecute those who travel out of state to get an abortion.” The FCC’s current 2-2 split “enables a data free-for-all on our mobile devices,” the groups said. “At a time when core privacy rights are being challenged and in some cases decimated, a kneecapped FCC is the last problem we should have.”