Thune: Gigi Sohn is Unfit to Serve on the FCC

Thune: Gigi Sohn is Unfit to Serve on the FCC

“In each of her nomination hearings, Gigi Sohn has misled the Commerce Committee, and her long record of virulent partisanship and bad judgment make her unfit to serve on the FCC.”

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WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), ranking member of the Subcommittee on Communications, Media, and Broadband, today issued the following statement regarding the nomination of Gigi Sohn to serve on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

“Americans deserve an FCC nominee who can do his or her job impartially, regardless of the matter before the commission,” said Thune. “In each of her nomination hearings, Gigi Sohn has misled the Commerce Committee, and her long record of virulent partisanship and bad judgment make her unfit to serve on the FCC. Should her nomination come for a vote before the Commerce Committee, I will oppose it and urge my colleagues to do the same.”

Today, Thune questioned Sohn during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing about her extreme position on net neutrality and her role in leaking information that led to the collapse of a bipartisan broadband deal when working at the FCC. Thune has previously raised concerns about Sohn’s partisanship. Thune also spoke about Sohn’s partisan record during the Senate Republican leadership press conference today.

Thune’s press conference remarks below:

“One of the most important tasks that we will have over the course of the next two years is processing nominees that the president puts forward to the courts or to the executive branch of the government.

“And you would hope that these would be nominees who would be capable of carrying out the task of performing the people’s business. But that hasn’t been the case with a number of Biden administration nominees.

“In fact, there was a huge story in the last couple of weeks about a Biden nominee for a judgeship who couldn’t answer basic, simple questions about the Constitution. That performance, as a matter of fact, went viral.

“There have been nominees who have been soft on crime, anti-police, that have been put forward for important positions on the judiciary. And so, it’s important for us as the Senate to do our diligence when it comes to vetting and processing these nominees. And one that I would like to speak to is one that was before the Senate Commerce Committee this morning, and that is Gigi Sohn to be a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission.

“Ms. Sohn is somebody who has a record of far-left activism, of rank partisanship. She has expressed disdain for Republicans, including supporting, contributing to, something we’ve never seen before, Democrats’ Senate campaigns this year. She has gone after and demonized conservative media outlets.

“She has been part of, there was a campaign back in 2016, where the then-chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, asked her to leak information to the press, which scuttled a deal, a bipartisan deal, that the commission had agreed to. So, she’s just got a record of partisanship and activism that doesn’t suggest that she would be able to perform her job in a nonpartisan way and do the kind of work that we expect an agency with that kind of jurisdiction that impacts so much of our daily lives to do.

“She is somebody who should be rejected by the United States Senate, and I hope there are enough discerning Democrats out there that will come to that conclusion.

“Right now, the FCC is two-two. It’s functioning in a perfectly normal way, they’re getting things done, and putting her on the FCC would add partisanship, make it increasingly difficult, I think, for the FCC to do its job in the way the American people expect it.”

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