There’s this scene in Mad Max: Fury Road where one of the older ladies explains satellites to the younger ladies. “They used to bounce messages across the Earth,” she explains – but they’re useless in the post-nuclear wasteland.
And this could be a sign of things to come, unless one recalcitrant senator stops putting corporations ahead of country.
Namely, Sen. Ted Cruz has hijacked the Republican reconciliation bill for one of his state’s most politically powerful corporations.
The Texas Republican is currently waging an intra-party battle to jam a wireless spectrum “pipeline” mandate — requiring the federal government to clear and auction big chunks of spectrum currently used by the U.S. military — into the Republicans’ upcoming reconciliation bill. Texas-headquartered AT&T is the loudest champion for Cruz’s proposal, which would help the nation’s three big cell phone carriers head off growing competition from smaller rivals.
Cruz’s idea, in theory, is to wring a few extra billion dollars out of spectrum auctions to help offset the cost of the broader tax cut package. In reality, he’s carving a rift straight down the center of the Republican Party — one that pits him against national security hawks and even the president himself.
That’s right, Cruz’s spectrum proposal runs directly counter to a cornerstone Trump initiative: the president’s push to create an “Iron Dome for America” because “the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex with the development by peer and near-peer adversaries of next-generation delivery systems and their own homeland integrated air and missile defense capabilities.”
Trump is staking his political capital on this next-generation missile defense system, and senior generals have been crystal clear that delivering on the president’s directive will require full access to the DoD’s current spectrum holdings.
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As a backhanded endorsement, both China and Russia have “slammed” the president’s plan because it would … protect us from them. But we can’t build a modern, effective continental missile shield if our radar and satellite systems’ spectrum bandwidth has been sold off so the highest telecom bidder can brag about its lightning speed!
But Cruz isn’t budging. His office continues to press for a spectrum pipeline that defense experts warn would make the Iron Dome effort technically unworkable. In doing so, he’s forcing his fellow Senate Republicans into an absurdly unnecessary dilemma: cross Cruz, the powerful chairman of the Commerce Committee — or defy the Commander-in-Chief on one of his top national defense priorities.
The kicker? The stakes of this showdown are laughably low. Hill insiders estimate the difference in Congressional Budget Office scoring between a clean spectrum reauthorization (with no clearing mandate) and Cruz’s AT&T-blessed alternative is barely $5 billion. That’s not nothing — but in the context of a $4 or $5 trillion reconciliation bill, it’s barely a rounding error.
For this illusory prize, Cruz would imperil Republicans’ do-or-die tax cut negotiations and tank Trump’s signature missile defense initiative. It’s a political miscalculation of the highest order. Republicans are already walking a tightrope of their own to get reconciliation across the finish line. Every vote matters. Every demand added to the pile complicates the calculus. And yet here we are, with Cruz in near-open warfare with his more hawkish GOP colleagues over what amounts to a telecom industry sweetheart deal wrapped in empty buzzwords.
Let’s not kid ourselves about what’s happening here. The big winners of Cruz’s spectrum crusade would be AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, who are eager for more 5G real estate and loathe to share these bands with military systems or smaller commercial rivals. The losers? Trump, his Iron Dome plan, and any GOP senator caught in the political crossfire.
When he’s at his best, Cruz is one of the most effective conservative voices in the Senate. But Cruz’s political Achilles Heel has always been a failure to know when it’s time to stop grandstanding and get in line with the rest of the team. It’s bad enough to make that mistake as a rookie lawmaker or an embittered GOP primary loser; it’s inexcusable now. It doesn’t matter how great our satellites are if we end up in a Mad Max hellscape.
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