Sat radio is going down the tubes. Probably will be bankrupt before the end of the year.
Should this actually get passed...does Rush move to satellite?
To ask the question is to reveal the bankruptcy of the attack on syndicated radio. There is no "bandwidth scarcity" - there wasn't actually as much of one when the FCC was instituted as was claimed, and with modern technology there is a whole lot less of one now.Any effort by the Democrats to undermine Rush's operations would be transparently partisan, which the Constitution and the First Amendment were crafted to prevent. The way to read the Constitution is that the government had no authority to censor communications, even without the First Amendment. What the First Amendment actually does is to provide mere examples of government behavior which the body of the Constitution already did not authorize. Thus communication - even in the form of smearing chocolate on a nude body - has been held to be constitutionally protected, irrespective of the fact that "chocolate" is not mentioned in the First Amendment.
Think of it this way: after the ratification of the Civil War amendments, race has been held to be a suspect category. I.e., the government is under suspicion of discriminating against people of different races than the president of the US. Well, the First Amendment creates suspect categories of its own - the government is under suspicion of persecuting Christians (and/or other religious people), it is under suspicion of censoring communications, and it is under suspicion of persecuting peaceful assemblies of people critical of the government. And if people can be put in the position of having to prove their innocence of racial discrimination, the government would be mighty uncomfortable trying to explain to SCOTUS (only 4 of whose current members voted to uphold McCain-Feingold) that a change of the rules of radio licensing which caused the most prominent critic of the president and of the majorities in the House and Senate to lose his soap box was not intended to violate the right of the people to listen to him if they wanna, on the same terms to which they are accustomed.