The House of Representatives majority, which is held by the GOP and is anti - net neutrality, also represents more than 50% of the US population by this method of counting (which says the state AGs “represent” people who didn’t vote for them).
Under the constitutional system of the US something like net neutrality could be passed as a law by the congress, but there hasn’t been a congress that chose to do so.
Like legislators, attorneys general represent "the people," not just those who voted for them, and that is the case even if no one voted for them. (As an interesting side-note, there are a few states whose attorneys general is governor-appointed and even one whose attorney general is appointed by the state's Supreme Court.)
I believe the point being made was that it has been too difficult to get Congress to act on reinstating something that is overwhelmingly popular across the nation. The FCC won't do it. Congress won't do it. Yet, when we put some numbers behind it, WaPo reported in December of last year on a study concluding that 8 in 10 Americans disapproved of the FCC's handling of net neutrality.
> study concluding that 8 in 10 Americans disapproved of the FCC's handling of net neutrality.
Disapproved about which part of its handling on the issue though? Did they disapprove of it being instated or revoked? Or the timeline on which either occurred? Or did they disagree with FCC shoehorning it with regulations written for telephones?
Not OP, but I think they're referring to this story [0] about a survey conducted by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland. The results showed 83% opposition to repealing the existing net neutrality regulations. A lot of the coverage around this topic makes it out to be a partisan issue, but all of the research shows strong support for net neutrality regulations across the board.
The Senate actually came up with a resolution to reinstate NN but Paul Ryan refuses to bring it up for a vote in the House. So there is your legislative bottleneck. If it passes the house and the senate, of course trump will sign it and take credit for it. Not a difficult task there.
> If it passes the house and the senate, of course trump will sign it and take credit for it
That's pretty much inconceivable. He made repealing it part of his campaign, and specifically claimed that it was an Obama power grab designed to target conservative media.
Even if he has decided since then that net neutrality is acceptable, or even actually desirable and wants it to happen, he would not do it by merely reinstating the 2015 rules for that would be a tacit admission that he was wrong during the campaign.
He would do it by having new rules written, so that he could say that he fixed the Obama rules.
If Trump supports it, why doesn't he instruct Ajit Pai to implement this policy, or if he doesn't want to do it, why doesn't he replace Ajit Pai with somebody whose views on the subject align with those of Trump? I think it might be because Trump doesn't actually support it.
I think you confuse the caricature of Trump that is pleasing to you to behold because you disagree with him with the actual Trump. While it is pleasing to think people you disagree with are blithering idiots, in case one of them is a President of the US the ignorance of the real state of affairs is not on your side and is not going to serve you well. It is always wrong to underestimate your opponent, it's particularly dangerous if the opponent has a lot of power.
You have heard Trump speak right? You've heard his nuclear speech and his mouth instrument speech? You've read transcripts of his interviews? Listened to him ramble incoherently while tries to answer questions? Read his tweets? "I'm a very stable genius." "I have the best words." "My IQ is one of the highest." etc...
It's hard not to believe the caricature is real when the person creating it is Trump himself. Half of his tweets sound like literal caricature.
This is all completely independent of any disagreements I have with him. I saw Trump give a speech sometime in the early 2000s long before he was a serious political candidate. I thought he sounded like an idiot back then too.
Of course it's possible that he is actually very intelligent, but he just sounds dumb when he talks, or maybe he tries to sound like that to be more appealing to his base.
If that's the case though, you can hardly blame someone for taking him at face value.
Yes, I've heard Trump speak. And I've read the soundbites that people whose only professional interest seems to be to hunt soundbites collected. And since Trumps loves to speak, and his speech style is very peculiar, there's a lot of soundbites. But I also looked beyond the soundbites, and that is what any person that wants to understand and not just confirm their biases formed on Twitter should do. And if you look beyond the soundbites, Trump is not an idiot (neither are Bush, Obama, Clinton or any other politicians who people who get paid for painting caricatures and monetizing them as clicks painted as idiots). He is somewhat of an opportunist, though this is pretty common among politicians. He also has some very definite agenda - which is not to everybody's liking, of course - and part of this agenda is massive deregulation. If you didn't notice that, you may have been paying too much attention to twitter noise and too little attention to what is actually happening in the government (which, contrary to popular belief, is not ruled by tweets).
I don't think this is true at all. You could say that deregulation is his is goal, but you'd have to ignore his opposition to free trade and immigration, which are every bit as central to his policies as tax cuts, and reigning in the EPA.
His agenda is whatever works for him right now. He throws out policy ideas and sees what sticks. Granted it does take some amount of intelligence to recognize what's working and what's not, but I think his success is mostly a product of iteration and luck--he's been sticking his toes in politics since the late 90s.
But let's say he is fairly intelligent--his ability to believe his own bullshit means that he is just plain wrong about as often as someone who is actually just dumb. Completely ignoring his speaking style, he is just constantly, factually wrong. He's wrong about little details that aren't politically advantageous to lie about.
And like you said, he likes to talk, but nothing he's ever written or spoken about gives me any indication that he has more than a surface level understanding of any topic.
You raise some decent points in general, but it is hard to apply them to Trump in the case of net neutrality because he has actually spoken out on it [1]:
> Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media
In general, having Trump speaking on something in 2014 doesn't mean he'd not flip on it in 2018, but Trump has showed very definite desire for reducing regulations, so without an explicit statement I'd say it's unlikely he'd support Net Neutrality. He also doesn't have much tactical reason to - NN is the cause of major content companies, like FAANG, and those are no Trump's friends, and neither they are friends of his base. So Trump has no reason to try and make nice with them.
Not sure why you’re downvoted when you’re right. The senate is meant to be the equalizer, where all states are on equal footing. The House is intended to favor more populous regions. It’s not that the people of the US don’t have as much of a say as they should — it’s that they don’t have _any_ say, anywhere.
Under the constitutional system of the US something like net neutrality could be passed as a law by the congress, but there hasn’t been a congress that chose to do so.