Lauren Frayer

House Commerce Committee Chair Greg Walden (R-OR) was spotted dining with telecommunications lobbyists, among others, at the Trump International Hotel ahead of the President's address to Congress. The companies/organizations represented included AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, CTIA, and USTelecom.

The Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office confirms former Attorney General Scott Pruitt used private email for state business.

Attorneys within the office conducted the search of Pruitt’s private, personal email account and did not find any documents that had not been captured in the search of official Oklahoma attorney general accounts. Open government advocate and media professor Dr. Joey Senat said the state law regarding open records indicates that private accounts cannot be used to shield government officials from transparency laws. Senat said one of the weaknesses of Oklahoma’s law on open records relies on trusting public officials that they have conducted appropriate searches of private accounts. It is not illegal to use a private email account for state business, as long as those records are included in searches for public documents. However, the revelation is in direct conflict with Pruitt’s written and oral testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee during the confirmation process. Pruitt, who is now the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, told lawmakers he had never used private email for state business.

Large portions of the Republican caucus embrace a kind of policy nihilism. They criticize any piece of legislation that doesn’t completely accomplish conservative goals, but don’t build coalitions to devise complex legislation themselves. The roster of congressional Republicans includes lots of passionate ideological voices. It is lighter on the kind of wonkish, compromise-oriented technocrats who move bills. The years of lock-step Republican opposition to President Obama’s agenda is well known and rooted in ideology. But the aversion to doing the messy work of making policy really goes back further than that.

The last time congressional Republicans have done the major lifting of making domestic policy was President George Bush’s first term, a productive time that included an expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs, the No Child Left Behind education law, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that reshaped securities law, and tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. But that’s now a decade and a half ago. Only 51 of the 238 current House Republicans were in Congress then — meaning a significant majority of Republican House members have never been in Congress at a time when their party was making major domestic policy. “The vast bulk of the Republican conference were elected on howls of protests against Obama’s agenda, but governing is a very different skill,” said Michael Steel, who was a top aide to former Speaker of the House John Boehner, and is now a managing director at Hamilton Place Strategies. “It requires a different kind of muscle, and that muscle has atrophied.”

The Senate Commerce Committee is adding Crystal Tully and Cort Bush to its staff ranks, a personnel influx that follows the departure of two of the panel's tech aides in the last couple of months. Tully, formerly an aide to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), will join the committee as a counsel, while Bush, who comes from Sen. Jerry Moran's (R-KS) office, will serve as a professional staff member.

“It has been held impermissible,” Federal Judge J. Paul Oetken wrote, “to exclude a single television news network from live coverage of mayoral candidates’ headquarters and to withhold White House press passes in a content-based or arbitrary fashion.”

Feb 24’s developments at the White House crossed that legal line, said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “That was unconstitutional,” he said. “If you exclude reporters from briefings that they otherwise have a right to attend because you don’t like their reporting, then you have engaged in viewpoint discrimination.” Viewpoint discrimination by the government in a public forum is almost always unconstitutional. Public officials are not required to give reporters perfectly equal access, of course, and exclusive interviews and selective leaks are commonplace and lawful. But First Amendment experts said the allocation of government resources like press passes and access to public forums like news conferences must be based on neutral criteria rather than discrimination based on what the journalists had written.

Japanese telecom company SoftBank Group is orchestrating a deal between US satellite startup OneWeb and debt-laden satellite operator Intelsat SA in an attempt to deliver faster and cheaper internet connections world-wide.

OneWeb, which is 40 percent-owned by SoftBank, will buy Intelsat, combining two very different types of satellite fleets that would offer low-cost, versatile connectivity spanning the globe. As part of the deal, SoftBank will inject $1.7 billion into the combined company, in which it will hold a 40 percent stake. The deal, which is subject to approval by Intelsat bondholders, would lower Intelsat’s roughly $14.5 billion debt by about $3.6 billion, while allowing OneWeb to further expand its ambitious satellite-production and deployment plans in the next decade.

Google is taking the plunge into live television with a new streaming service that's designed to compete with Sling TV, DirecTV Now and PlayStation Vue. Google revealed YouTube TV — a $35-a-month service that allows for up to six user profiles. The plan, which like other streaming services does not require a contract or long-term commitment, comes with many of the same key channels available on other platforms, such as Comcast SportsNet, ESPN, Syfy and the Disney Channel. YouTube TV also comes with a strong array of broadcast network channels, such as ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and the CW, though Viacom appears to be absent from the lineup. Local news programming from network affiliates will also be included, according to Robert Kyncl, YouTube's chief business officer, at the event. Still, YouTube TV lacks some notable cable channels — CNN, HBO and Cartoon Network are not on the list featured in YouTube's blog post, for example.

It’s imperative that we remain focused on policies that result in bringing high-capacity and high-speed broadband networks to communities that need it the most. That is why we’re providing this constructive blueprint that offers guideposts for how policymakers can strive for thoughtful and effective broadband policies:
Identify problem areas before spending money to fix them.
Deliver broadband to those who don’t have it.
Provide equal opportunities for all qualified broadband providers.
Embrace alternative technologies in remote areas.
Ensure transparency and accountability to ensure government funds achieve intended results.

Sen Dick Durbin (DIL) railed against President Donald Trump, blasting the president for his attacks on the news media. “The integrity of the news industry is under an unprecedented attack,” Sen Durbin said at an event put on by National Association of Broadcasters. “These attacks aren’t just coming from outside our border or the Russian government. The attacks are coming from our own government.”

In his speech, the Democratic senator outlined several protections for journalists that he wants Congress to pursue, including preserving federal libel standards and spending more on public media. He also implored President Trump and his Vice President Mike Pence to consider working with Congress to pass a shield law that would protect journalists from revealing their sources. The Illinois senator noted that he was particularly concerned by the president’s remarks in the context of Trump’s tone on Russia. “His near-constant stream of invective towards the media is even more troubling when you consider that President Trump has had only praise for a dictator and former KGB official who ordered a cyber act of war against our nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin,” Durbin told the crowd.

A ruling issued on Feb 27 by a federal judge in Manhattan, in a case brought by a freelance journalist without a lawyer, may interest the White House. The judge said that the New York Police Department may have violated the First Amendment by revoking the press credentials of the journalist, Jason B. Nicholas. The ruling was preliminary, and the Police Department said it had legitimate reasons for its actions. But Judge J. Paul Oetken’s decision was timely, following as it did the exclusion of several news organizations from a Feb 24 meeting.. “It has been held impermissible,” Judge Oetken wrote, “to exclude a single television news network from live coverage of mayoral candidates’ headquarters and to withhold White House press passes in a content-based or arbitrary fashion.”

Feb 24’s developments at the White House crossed that legal line, said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “That was unconstitutional,” he said. “If you exclude reporters from briefings that they otherwise have a right to attend because you don’t like their reporting, then you have engaged in viewpoint discrimination.” Viewpoint discrimination by the government in a public forum is almost always unconstitutional.