WASHINGTON-C-Span junkies watching late into the night of Dec. 8 may not have realized that what happened just before the Senate left town was right out of a Hollywood script.
Minutes (literally) before the Senate adjourned for the year, it managed to pass a troika of important wireless bills-spectrum relocation, enhanced 911 upgrades and universal service.
“It was pretty fascinating for me having served in Congress. Being on this side of the equation was a bit different,” said CTIA President Steve Largent. “There was a lot of gamesmanship and a lot of that type of thing going on.”
Largent served for seven years as a Republican congressman from Oklahoma. But as the top lobbyist for the wireless industry, he is now a “behind the scenes” character. Up front, in starring roles were lawmakers including some senators that refused to let the Senate adjourn until the telecommunications legislation passed.
“The people who kept the Senate from adjourning were E911 Congressional Caucus members,” said Stephen Seitz, director of government affairs for the National Emergency Number Association.
But the story of how the bill, which President George W. Bush signed into law Dec. 23, got passed starts long before 11 p.m. on Dec. 8.
“There was lots of suspense, lots of moving parts and a small collection of inner core people pressing in artful and sophisticated ways to use the legislative process to get it through the Senate in the waning moments,” said Bill Anaya, senior director of legislative affairs for Motorola Inc.
As Congress was racing to leave town in October before the 2004 elections, a plan was formulating among key players to combine three pieces of telecom legislation into one bill in hopes of overcoming individual objections to the various pieces.
This plan moved forward throughout November as Congress prepared to return to town for a lame-duck session.
“We ended up using our name brand up front, used the universal-service bill to keep the train moving and put the difficult one in the middle,” said Seitz.
Packaging the three bills together created unlikely allies. With Largent and the rest of the CTIA lobbying team focused on passing the spectrum relocation trust fund bill, rural telephone companies-which often are at odds with wireless carriers-wanted to get the universal-service legislation passed.
“We thought it would be an impossible task because it was so late in the game,” said Tom Wacker, director of government affairs for the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association.
The plan seemed to be working as the House passed the bill Nov. 20 and sent it to the Senate for consideration.
But then in perfect Hollywood fashion, a dramatic turn of events made the road to passage seem unlikely. When the bill reached the Senate, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, attached an amendment that would create a boxing commission to govern that sport.
“I learned more about boxing than I wanted to know,” said Largent.
Since both houses of Congress must pass identical legislation, the bill had to go back to the House. The House was opposed to the boxing commission so it appeared as Congress left town for Thanksgiving that perhaps the bills would all die.
But in every good Hollywood story, a hero emerges.
The first hero was perhaps NENA, which agreed to keep the bill together although a deal had been worked out to pass the E911 piece of legislation separately.
“During the last of the last lame-duck sessions, we were approached about peeling off. We said no because we thought it was best that the bills remained together,” said Seitz.
The next hero was the congressional leadership.
“What was extraordinary was the level of engagement of the speaker’s office and leader Frist’s office with McCain to get this done,” said Anaya, referring to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). “That is one of the cool and defining moments in getting this legislation done.”
With Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), chairman of the House Commerce Committee, agreeing to consider McCain’s boxing commission legislation this year, McCain was willing to let the package pass.
“The issue for McCain was he wanted a commitment at some level from the House that it would consider the boxing legislation that he had sent over there. We spent a lot of time trying to negotiate those personality and relationship issues that always exist between the House and Senate,” said Largent. “It doesn’t make any sense to hold these positive bills hostage.”
The E911 portion of the bill created a $250 million grant program and an executive-level coordination office.
The spectrum relocation bill, officially known as the Commercial Spectrum Enhancement Act, created a fund financed from revenue of spectrum auctioned for third-generation wireless licenses to pay to relocate certain military radio systems from 1700 MHz to other frequencies. The legislation was based on a Bush administration-brokered deal that compensates the Department of Defense for clearing 45 megahertz of spectrum that mobile-phone carriers could occupy to provide 3G services.
The universal-service bill temporarily exempts the universal-service fund from certain accounting rules. The telecom industry became concerned earlier this year when the Universal Service Administrative Co. halted E-rate subsidies because of an accounting change.
Largent said the USF piece was the most sensitive portion of the triple play.
“The one I thought politically would be the most sensitive was the USF because of the potential for all of their constituents’ phone bills would have gone up,” said Largent.
