Chuck Schumer Admits What’s Been Obvious For A While: There Just Aren’t Enough Votes To Pass Sketchy Antitrust Bill Targeting Tech Companies

Advocates for the problematic American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) (which includes groups and organizations I often agree with and work with) keep insisting that they have the votes to pass the bill and demanding that Senator Chuck Schumer bring it to the floor for a vote. Schumer, who correctly has no interest in wasting floor time on a controversial bill that won't pass, has now admitted that the votes just aren't there to pass it.

Schumer called the bill a high priority," but said the Senate doesn't have the 60 votes needed to approve it, according to people who attended a fundraiser for Schumer at Bistro Bis, a restaurant near Capitol Hill.

Schumer made the comments in response to a question about the measure, the American Choice and Innovation Online Act, which would prevent internet platforms from giving advantages to their own products and services.

As we've been discussing, the only way that this bill has Republican support is because the bill is written in a manner that will open it up to abuse by Republican politicians and officials to go after these companies over content moderation choices they disagree about, claiming that they're preferencing for anti-competitive reasons. Republicans have made it abundantly clear that they ONLY support the bill for this very reason and will pull their support if the bill is clarified to say that it's about actual competition issues, and not content moderation.

That should alarm Democrats pushing the bill AND our friends in the activist community who are so committed to this mistargeted bill.

But they're so infatuated with getting a win" on antitrust, that they no longer seem to care about the damage this bill could do.

I mean, as if to put an exclamation point on the dangers of this bill, the same article quoting Schumer that he doesn't have the votes also quotes an extreme rightwing ideologue from the American Principles Project talking about how important it is to pass the bill. While the article frames the American Principles Project as a right-leaning group that advocates for antitrust reform" that is underselling APP by quite a bit.

It's a far right extremist group that has argued Republicans need to embrace exclusionary extremist culture wars to win elections, has been a leader in pushing for censorship of books in schools and libraries, more or less kicked off the entire anti-trans culture war, among many other things. It was also a driving force (something it was quite proud of) in pushing false and misleading claims in trying to block the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court.

This is not a right-leaning group that advocates for antitrust reform." It's an extremist group pushing nonsense Trumpist culture wars. And its one of the most active in pushing for AICOA. Which many Democrats are supporting. At some point, someone needs to ask why?

Thankfully, Schumer's comments about not having the votes suggests that at least some Democrats are realizing that maybe they don't want to pass a bill that the GOP is eagerly, and quite publicly, planning to exploit.