User:John Broughton/Criticism of Ted Stevens

U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) has garnered a significant amount of criticism. Some of this criticism is detailed below.

Network neutrality
On June 28, 2006, the Senate commerce committee was in the final day of three days of hearings, during which the Committee members considered over 200 amendments to an omnibus telecommunications bill. Senator Stevens authored the bill, S. 2686, the Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006.

Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Byron Dorgan (D-ND) cosponsored and spoke on behalf of an amendment that would have inserted strong network neutrality mandates into the bill. In between speeches by Snowe and Dorgan, Stevens gave an 11 minute speech in which he made several technical and terminological errors while attempting to explain his opposition to the amendment. For example, he referred to the internet as "not a big truck," but a "series of tubes" that could be clogged with information. He also complained that "an Internet [sic] was sent by my staff" and that commercial traffic delayed it by five days; it is believed he was referring to an email which was sent by his staff.

Of 22 Senators, 11 voted for the amendment and 11 against. Because it failed to garner majority support, the amendment failed.

The audio from the day's hearing is available at the Committee web site as a streaming media file in RealMedia format, playable with RealPlayer. Stevens' speech begins at 1:13:11 and ends at 1:24:19.

Soon after, Stevens' interpretation of how the Internet worked became a topic on the blogosphere, with many writers and commentators derisively citing Stevens' misunderstanding of Internet technology, arguing that the speech showed that Stevens had apparently formed a strong opinion on a topic which he understood poorly. This Internet phenomenon sparked mainstream media attention, and was prominently featured on several episodes of Comedy Central's The Daily Show. "Series of tubes" has now become a mainstream catch phrase.

Secret hold
The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 was introduced by Democratic Senator Barack Obama and Republican Senator Tom Coburn with an intention to create a public website with an easily searchable database of the name and amount of every federal grant, contract or award of $25,000 or more. The alternative approaches for obtaining this information are generally considered to be too complex for the general public.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously passed the measure on July 27, 2006 and it was on its way to full Senate passage when an unknown Senator placed a "secret hold" on the bill. According to Senate rules, the bill will never come to a vote as long as the hold continues. Holds are an unofficial part of Senate parliamentary tradition that allow a single senator to block a measure anonymously.

In August 2006, a bipartisan group of bloggers initiated a campaign to identify the Senator who placed the secret hold. Eventually, a previous story on Coburn was found where he identified Stevens as "the only senator blocking it". On August 30, a spokesman for the Senator confirmed that he was the man behind the secret hold on the Coburn/Obama bill.

Hurricane Katrina
On October 20 2005, Stevens threatened to resign from the Senate if lawmakers passed language that would have stripped money allocated for two bridges in Alaska (primarily the Gravina Island Bridge, commonly referred to in the media as The Bridge to Nowhere) and redirected it to Hurricane Katrina repairs in Louisiana. That language was defeated, but in the face of intense public and private criticism, Congress later removed funding from the bridges specifically and instead redirected the money to a pot for Alaska's general transportation use. Stevens said later that he would not resign over this action because the money was not being taken away from Alaska in general. The Senator's comments on December 21 2005 after a contentious vote on a defense bill from which ANWR provisions had been removed again prompted speculation over his resignation.

Energy
Despite objections from other committee members, Stevens refused to swear in the executives of the major oil companies when investigating Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force. .

Proposal to limit internet use in schools and libraries
Stevens received criticism for introducing a bill in January 2007 that would limit the use of social networking sites in public schools and libraries. Sites falling under the language of this bill could include MySpace, Facebook, Digg, and Reddit. Despite initial concerns, the bill would probably not affect Wikipedia.