Reed Hundt -- Al Gore's high school chum who oversaw telecom deregulation as head of the FCC from 1993-1997 -- used to complain about the "incredible partisanship" of the Republican Congress. Well, a fox smells its own hole. THE SCRAPBOOK can't really recommend Hundt's forthcoming memoir You Say You Want a Revolution as light reading, but the page proofs contain ample evidence of Hundt's stunning hypocrisy in accusing anyone else of partisanship.
Hundt sought the FCC post in the first instance, he now says, with a pledge to be "Al's lieutenant." In 1996, while publicly professing that "we must not slip into the abyss of partisanship," he fought the National Association of Broadcasters over his plan to regulate children's TV programming because, he now admits, "I believed we were helping the President and Vice President win re-election."
And here is his amazingly frank version of what it means for a supposedly independent agency to implement legislation Congress has passed (the 1996 telecom reform, in this case): "Under principles of statutory interpretation, we had broad authority to exercise our discretion in writing the implementing regulations. Indeed, like the modern engineers trying to straighten the Leaning Tower of Pisa, we could aspire to provide the new entrants to the local telephone markets a fairer chance to compete than they might find in any explicit provision of the law."
Hundt, in short, deserved every bit of "partisan" oversight that he got and probably didn't get enough.