Alabama RNC committeeman has run-in with GOP leadership over net neutrality

United States Capitol (Photo: Eric B. Walker)

Alabama businessman Paul Reynolds took his fight against big government regulations to the Republican National Convention last year, and ended up unexpectedly going toe-to-toe with House Republican leadership in the process.

Reynolds, as many Republicans and conservatives, has become increasingly wary of the Obama administration’s use of executive orders to circumvent laws passed by Congress, and as Alabama’s national committeeman to the Republican National Committee, he is in a position to push the party to do something about it.

At the RNC’s winter meeting in San Diego in January, Reynolds sponsored a resolution that would call on Republicans in Congress to use the Congressional Review Act to review, and possibly overturn federal regulations.

But he quickly ran into a roadblock. For reasons unknown to him at the time, House leadership was trying to squash the resolution.

“The reason they didn’t want it to come out like that,” Reynolds told Yellowhammer in an interview Tuesday, “is I made reference in the resolution to something that is a real hot topic in Washington right now. It is something called net neutrality.”

“Hot topic” is probably a little bit of an understatement.

Net neutrality is a phrase that is often thrown around, but rarely understood.

According to the Heritage Foundation, the term “refers to the principle that the owners of broadband networks (such as Verizon and Comcast)… should treat all communications traveling over their networks alike.” The concern among many conservatives is that, in an effort to enforce net neutrality, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is seeking to label the internet a “public utility,” bringing it under its purview. In other words, for the first time ever, the internet would be regulated by the government.

“What they’re trying to do is get ahold of the internet by a government regulatory agency, it just happens to be the FCC,” explained Reynolds, who regularly deals with the FCC in his career as a broadcast engineering consultant. “What they’re trying their best to do is to make the internet a public utility… That will give them the ability to regulate the flow of information, who gets what bandwidth when. It also gives them the ability to put fees on the internet for service and determine what categories get preference when there is a bandwidth shortage… That’s ok until somebody like Yellowhammer starts being squeezed out when they take a political position.”

Reynolds assumed such a resolution would pass with ease, but was surprised when the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) objected. It took some digging in the Resolutions committee, Reynolds said, to find out why GOP leadership wanted it killed.

“At the time, the House of Representatives was considering addressing the same thing as the FCC, but they wanted to do it through legislation,” Reynolds said. “Instead of letting a government agency take it over, the House just wants to put a small amount of regulation on the internet… and leave it at that. But the FCC has already written up the new rules and regulations—332 pages of them—and they’re going to vote on them February 26th.”

Once Reynolds and his committee got to the bottom of Congressional leadership’s problem with his resolution, he made some adjustments and was able to get it passed.

“It was really interesting how it played out,” he said, “I understand why some people did not want it done right at the time… They didn’t tell me why they didn’t want it done, they just wanted to squash it.”

In addition to his career and service as Alabama’s national committeeman, Reynolds is also the founder of the Alabama Free Market Alliance (AFMA), a grassroots group dedicated to “educating Alabamians on conservative, free-market principles and mobilizing them as advocates for putting those principles to work solving Alabama’s problems.”

In 2013, Yellowhammer named AFMA one of the top 5 conservative organizations in Alabama.

Check out the entire resolution below.