Lee Defends Global Down Syndrome Foundation
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WASHINGTON—Today, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) delivered the following remarks on the Senate floor. Video of the speech is available here.
Mr. President,
Over the weekend, syndicated columnist George F. Will wrote about a disturbing ruling in a French court.
The court ruled that a video called “Dear Future Mom” produced by the Global Down Syndrome Foundation must be banned from French television.
What triggered the censorship? Inciting violence? Hate-speech? Discrimination? The opposite, as it turns out.
I’ll let Mr. Will tell the story:
The Right to be spared from guilt
by George F. Will
The word “inappropriate” is increasingly used inappropriately. It is useful to describe departures from good manners and other social norms, such as wearing white after Labor Day and using the salad fork with the entree.
But the adjective has become a splatter of verbal fudge, a weasel word falsely suggesting measured seriousness. Its misty imprecision does not disguise but advertises the user’s moral obtuseness.
A French court has demonstrated how “inappropriate” can be an all-purpose device of intellectual evasion and moral cowardice. The court said it is inappropriate to do something that might disturb people who killed their unborn babies for reasons that were, shall we say, inappropriate.
Prenatal genetic testing enables pregnant women to be apprised of a variety of problems with their unborn babies, including Down syndrome. It is a congenital condition resulting from a chromosomal defect that causes varying degrees of mental disability and some physical abnormalities, such as low muscle tone, small stature, flatness of the back of the head and an upward slant to the eyes. Within living memory, Down syndrome people were called Mongoloids.
Now they are included in the category called “special needs” people. What they most need is nothing special. It is for people to understand their aptitudes, and to therefore quit killing them in utero.
Down syndrome, although not common, is among the most common congenital anomalies at 49.7 per 100,000 births. In approximately 90 percent of instances when prenatal genetic testing reveals Down syndrome, the baby is aborted. Cleft lips or palates, which occur in 72.6 per 100,000 births, also can be diagnosed in utero and sometimes are the reason a baby is aborted.
In 2014, in conjunction with World Down Syndrome Day (March 21), the Global Down Syndrome Foundation prepared a two-minute video titled “Dear Future Mom” to assuage the anxieties of pregnant women who have learned that they are carrying a Down syndrome baby.
More than 7 million people have seen the video online in which one such woman says, “I’m scared: What kind of life will my child have?” Down syndrome children from many nations tell the woman that her child will hug, speak, go to school, tell you he loves you and “can be happy, just like I am — and you’ll be happy, too.”
The French state is not happy about this. The court has ruled that the video is — wait for it — “inappropriate” for French television. The court upheld a ruling in which the French Broadcasting Council had banned the video as a commercial.
The court said the video’s depiction of happy Down syndrome children was “likely to disturb the conscience of women who had lawfully made different personal life choices.”
So, what happens on campuses does not stay on campuses. There, in many nations, sensitivity bureaucracies have been enforcing the relatively new entitlement to be shielded from whatever might disturb, even inappropriate jokes.
And now this rapidly metastasizing right has come to this:
A video that accurately communicates a truthful proposition — that Down syndrome people can be happy and give happiness — should be suppressed because some people might become ambivalent, or morally queasy, about having chosen to extinguish such lives because . . .
This is why the video giving facts about Down syndrome people is so subversive of the flaccid consensus among those who say aborting a baby is of no more moral significance than removing a tumor from a stomach. Pictures persuade.
Today’s improved prenatal sonograms make graphic the fact that the moving fingers and beating heart are not mere “fetal material.” They are a baby. Toymaker Fisher-Price, children’s apparel manufacturer OshKosh, McDonald’s and Target have featured Down syndrome children in ads that the French court would probably ban from television.
The court has said, in effect, that the lives of Down syndrome people — and by inescapable implication, the lives of many other disabled people — matter less than the serenity of people who have acted on one or more of three vicious principles:
That the lives of the disabled are not worth living. Or that the lives of the disabled are of negligible value next to the desire of parents to have a child who has no special, meaning inconvenient, needs. Or that government should suppress the voices of Down syndrome children in order to guarantee other people’s right not to be disturbed by reminders that they have made lethal choices on the basis of one or both of the first two inappropriate principles.
Mr. President, as Americans enter a time of change in our politics, here’s hoping it can be a season of change in our hearts as well.
Here in the United States, the free speech rights of groups like the Global Down Syndrome Foundation to produce videos like “Dear Future Mom” – which I highly recommend - are protected by the First Amendment.
But the rights of actual Americans with Down Syndrome – both born and unborn – can only be protected by their fellow citizens. And not just in our laws, but in our families… our communities… our culture.
This time of year, we would all do well to remember the life-changing joy that can come from the birth of a single, unexpected, and special child.
And also to remember the courage of their mothers and fathers, who chose life… the heroes who dared to make room at the inn.
I know I speak for all my colleagues when I wish them all a happy Christmas season.
I yield the floor.
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Senators Introduce the Daniel Webster Congressional Clerkship Act of 2016
WASHINGTON – Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), John Hoeven (R-ND), and Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the Daniel Webster Congressional Clerkship Act, Monday, a bill that would improve the business of Congress and increase the public’s understanding of its work by establishing a structured congressional clerkship program for recent law school graduates and young lawyers.
“Unlike the Executive and Judicial branches, Congress currently lacks a structured program for recruiting and hiring recent law school graduates,” Sen. Lee said. “Too often this means that new attorneys, who are otherwise qualified and eager to work for Congress, do not even consider a congressional career and are instead pursuing other opportunities.”
“A clerkship can provide invaluable experience to a young lawyer at the start of his or her career,” Sen. Leahy said. “The federal judiciary has long had a clerkship program that teaches recent law school graduates the workings of the judicial branch. Yet there has never been a formal clerkship program in Congress. Creating a pathway for more young lawyers to gain an understanding of how Congress works and the value of public service will lead to a greater embrace of public service. I am proud to be introducing once again bipartisan legislation to encourage more young lawyers to work in the Congress.”
“We want to attract the best and the brightest to public service,” Sen. Hoeven said. “The Daniel Webster Congressional Clerkship Act will create a formal program to bring young, energetic and talented recent law graduates to work in the Senate and House and see firsthand representative democracy at work.”
“For many years, the brightest young minds coming out of law school have flocked to the federal courts and the executive branch for clerkships and fellowships,” Sen. Cruz said. “Unsurprisingly, this has contributed to the legal profession’s excessive focus on litigation and bureaucratic regulation, at the expense of legislative knowledge and development. The Daniel Webster Congressional Clerkship Act is a small, yet important step in the fight to change that trend. Ideally, the Act will better position Congress to obtain top-notch services from stellar law school graduates, and it will give those graduates access to—and a much better understanding of—the legislative process.”
Committees in the Senate and the House will be responsible to select at least six clerks each year to perform a one-year clerkship. These committees would oversee the selection process in order to guarantee fair allotment between the majority and minority party offices.
“Senators Lee, Leahy, Hoeven, and Cruz are to be applauded for their vision in championing this bipartisan legislation,” said the Coalition’s Steering Committee, comprised of Larry Kramer, former Dean of Stanford Law School; Robin West, law professor at Georgetown University Law Center; Bill Treanor, Dean of Georgetown University Law Center; Abbe Gluck, law professor at Yale Law School; and Dakota Rudesill, law professor at Ohio State.
“The problem is not that Congress does not have enough lawyers,” the Steering Committee noted. “Rather, the problem is that Congress is not competitive for the opportunity to apprentice lawyers on the fast track to the legal profession’s most influential ranks. Congress is missing the opportunity to shape the constitutional perspective of the law’s future leaders. That is because unlike the federal courts, federal agencies, law firms, and law schools, Congress lacks a regularized apprenticeship program that is readily accessible to any top new law graduate, on the basis of objective qualifications,” the Coalition’s Steering Committee emphasized.
This bill, named after Daniel Webster, is considered one of the most admired and distinguished lawyers and legislators to ever serve in Congress.
A digital version of this release is available here.
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Lee, Klobuchar to Host Hearing on AT&T-Time Warner Merger
WASHINGTON – Tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. EST, U.S. Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights will hold a hearing on the proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger, titled Examining the Competitive Impact of the AT&T-Time Warner Transaction.
Witnesses include Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO; Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner chairman and CEO; Mark Cuban, AXS TV chairman and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theatres, and Magnolia Pictures; Gene Kimmelman, Public Knowledge president and CEO; and Daphna Ziman, Cinemoi president.
The hearing will stream live on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s website.
What
Examining the Competitive Impact of the AT&T-Time Warner Transaction hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust, Competition Policy & Consumer Rights subcommittee
When
Wednesday, December 7, 2016 at 10:00 a.m. EST
Where
Dirksen Senate Office Building 226
Hearing will stream live here
Witnesses
Mr. Randall Stephenson
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
AT&T
Mr. Jeffrey Bewkes
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Time Warner
Mr. Mark Cuban
Chairman
AXS TV
Owner
Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theatres, And Magnolia Pictures
Mr. Gene Kimmelan
President & Chief Executive Officer
Public Knowledge
Ms. Daphna Ziman
President
Cinémoi
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Opening Statement
Examining the Competitive Impact of the AT&T-Time Warner Transaction
Senator Mike Lee
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
Welcome to this hearing of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights. Before we start, I would like to thank Ranking Member Klobuchar and her staff for their assistance in preparing for today. I’d also like to thank the Chairman of the full committee, Senator Grassley, for his support for the hearing. After I and Senators Klobuchar, Grassley, and Leahy give some opening remarks about this hearing, we will hear from our panel of witnesses, who I will introduce shortly, and then we will have seven-minute question rounds.
We are living in a golden age of television. One TV writer recently wrote that for “the first time I’ve beg[un] to feel like there may, in fact, be too much good TV.”[1] From Game of Thrones to House of Cards to many other programs across networks and platforms, the quantity and quality of programming content is greater than we have ever known.
The creativity, however, is not limited to content creators. Networks and distributors are also innovating to allow consumers new and unprecedented access to their content of choice. No longer are consumers limited to whatever bundle their local cable operator has negotiated. Dish, Sony, and DirecTV all offer cable bundles allowing consumers to stream live television over the Internet. Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and CBS, among others, allow consumers to purchase programming directly. And more innovation is on the horizon, as many industry participants expect 5G wireless technology to provide more competition to broadband and landline cable, opening up even more possibilities to content creators and distributors.
This brings us to the reason we are here today: to discuss the proposed acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T, and ensuring this flourishing marketplace for creative content retains its vibrancy. AT&T is the second-largest wireless carrier in the United States and, through its DirecTV and U-verse subsidiaries, the largest U.S. cable or satellite provider. Time Warner is currently the world’s third-largest television network and filmed TV entertainment company. In late October, AT&T announced that it reached a deal to purchase Time Warner for $85 billion. The proposed transaction would combine AT&T’s millions of wireless and pay-television subscribers with Time Warner’s media lineup, which includes CNN, TNT, HBO, and Warner Brothers’ film and TV studio.
The companies claim that this acquisition will result in significant benefits for consumers. The combined company will provide a “stronger competitive alternative to cable and other video providers” and “better value, more choices, [and an] enhanced customer experience for over-the-top and mobile viewing.”[2] Additionally, by controlling the customer experience from content creation through distribution, the combined company says it will be able to innovate its advertising practices and introduce customized or targeted advertising, providing both an improved customer experience and a significant competitor to digital advertising giants Google and Facebook.
This transaction involves no horizontal overlaps. However, if this fact ended the antitrust analysis, then this would be a very Seinfeldian hearing about nothing. Although vertical deals typically raise fewer concerns than horizontal deals, such deals nevertheless may still tend to substantially lessen competition – the key analysis under the Clayton Act. The principal concern with vertical integration is foreclosure, or denying access of competing firms to suppliers and customers. A key question thus becomes what will the incentives and opportunities be for the combined firm post-transaction?
Many critics of the deal have posited all sorts of potential anticompetitive abuses that the combination of AT&T and Time Warner could create. AT&T could increase the price of or reduce access to Time Warner content to rival television distributors, thereby not only raising its rivals’ costs, but also making its DirecTV products appear more attractive to consumers. This risk is particularly acute in the nascent online video services market. Over the past few years, we’ve seen the development of products like Sling and PlayStation Vue, which allow customers to watch a live stream of cable channels via their Internet connection. And DirecTV has just begun its own similar service, called DirecTV Now. AT&T’s ownership of HBO, CNN, and the other must-have television products of Time Warner could give DirecTV Now a significant competitive advantage over its competitors. AT&T’s ownership of these channels could also potentially force DirecTV’s rivals into a Hobson’s choice of higher prices or limited Time Warner content, knowing that many customers would migrate to DirecTV if its rivals refuse to pay the higher Time Warner prices.
The potential anticompetitive favoritism that the combined firm could bestow on its own products is not limited to price or access, but extends to the quality of the offerings as well. And it is here that we get to the siren song of zero-rating, whereby a wireless or broadband distributor excludes particular data from counting towards its customers’ data caps. On its face, zero-rating appears to be consumer friendly – the content is free for subscribers, and helps them avoid paying overage fees on data caps. However, critics argue that zero-rating transforms Internet service providers or wireless carriers from “relatively neutral conduits into gatekeepers.”[3] The FCC recently expressed concern that AT&T’s zero-rating practices “may obstruct competition and harm consumers by constraining their ability to access existing and future mobile video services not affiliated with AT&T.”[4] Critics say that such concerns would only be exacerbated if AT&T were able to bring Time Warner content under its fold. However, as the FCC letter itself illustrates, in regards to this merger, we also have a regulatory framework that is designed to at least minimize, if not eliminate, many of the posited anticompetitive harms.
The issues raised by this deal are complicated and, like most antitrust analysis, very fact intensive. The focus of the analysis should remain on maximizing consumer welfare, and consumer welfare is maximized by protecting competition, not necessarily by protecting competitors. While the final determination regarding the competitive impact of the deal will be made by the Department of Justice, I believe we can make a valuable contribution to the conversation today by closely examining the questions raised by this unique transaction. I look forward to hearing from and engaging with our witnesses regarding these issues.
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