Nanny Amy PDF Print E-mail
Written by Lady Logician   
Tuesday, 18 September 2007 08:58
Kermit wrote yesterday about legislation that our junior Senator, Amy Klobuchar is sponsoring. As a telecom "professional" I would like to add my 2 cents on the issue.

A little background on me. I have spent the last 10 years dealing with business telecom contracts for landlines and cell phones. I have spent many hours pouring over contracts with customers, looking for the "opt out" for poor service and exploiting them for the customer's benefit. I have helped more than a few disgruntled customers get out of contracts with no term penalty, it can be done.

Every phone company, be they landline or cellular, must run their contracts and services and charges past the Public Utilities Commission. The PUC (a state agency) is set up to deal with the companies that choose to do business in their state and it is the PUC's job to ensure that the customers welfare comes first to these companies. In addition, the Attorney General's office in each state has jurisdiction should the telecom/cell provider act in an illegal manner in their state. All of this leads to my issues with Senator Amy's proposed legislation.

The Act preempts state law, except that the Act does not preempt state laws that provide additional protections to wireless subscribers.

This legislation is nothing more than an overt power grab. Ms. Klobuchar has decided that the individual states are too incompetent to take care of the citizenry. She truly believes that ALL POWER must reside with the Federal Government and that is just plain unConstitutional!

The Constitution grants the majority of the powers to the STATES! Amendment X clearly states (the actual amendment, not the blogger)

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Yes, I understand that this does fall under "Interstate Commerce", however, the current set up more than adequately covers the problem that Nanny Amy wants to resolve. Make no mistake, gentle readers...Nanny Amy is not doing this for your benefit...she is only doing this for one reason. To make a bloated federal government even bigger and remove the best recourse (to the problem with wireless carriers) that the consumer currently has.