The Senate Commerce Committee is set to advance Maria Cantwell's (D-WA) Spectrum and National Security Act (SNNA), potentially with Republican support, on Tuesday. While the bill has some national security provisions, its primary purpose is to extend "Spectrum Auctions" along with DEI giveaways disguised as "infrastructure." The importance of stopping this bill goes beyond simply putting the breaks on yet another corporate giveaway and Biden regime DEI grift; an especially troubling part of the bill is that it sets a fixed policy on spectrum auctions for the next five years, effectively handcuffing future President Trump from using this critical piece of multi-billion dollar leverage as he sees fit.

What is a "spectrum auction" to begin with? The term spectrum in this context simply refers to zones or "bands" of the electromagnetic spectrum that can be used for telecommunications purposes. Radio waves, for instance, are zones of the electromagnetic spectrum that are used for what we conventionally consider AM and FM radio. The government has adopted the practice of auctioning off bands of the electromagnetic spectrum to private sector telecom companies as a way of efficiently allocating spectrum resources, which are worth tens of billions of dollars. The Spectrum and National Security Act in question ties the re-authorization of this auction authority to granting over $7 billion to the "Affordable Connectivity Program," a federal government giveaway from Biden's infrastructure bill that allegedly subsidizes internet access for "underserved communities." Comcast (the parent company of MSNBC) is one of the biggest recipients of such ACP grants and is lobbying aggressively for its extension under the SNNA.

Incidentally, Joe Biden's first fundraiser was held in a Comcast lobbyist's living room, and the wife of Comcast CEO Brian Roberts was one of Biden's biggest donors. Biden went on to include over $60 billion in broadband subsidies in his "infrastructure" bill, though almost none of it led to new broadband. Instead, these funds have been used to impose disparate impact mandates in broadband deployment under the FCC's "Digital Discrimination" initiative, as well as create an Equity and Diversity Council at the FCC.

The disparate impact doctrine opens up employers, small business owners, and others to legal liability if any policy results in a differential outcome among radical groups, even in the absence of discriminatory intent. A classic example would be an intelligence or aptitude test to screen potential employees. If such a test ended up with fewer blacks being hired, the employer using those tests could be legally liable under the disparate impact doctrine. As we put it in our classic piece on affirmative action, "disparate impact makes almost everything presumptively illegal, because everything has a disparate impact. This in effect gives near-absolute power to government bureaucrats and federal judges."