Tom DeLay helped create TV ownership cap—he says Trump FCC has no authority to repeal it
Congress set ownership limit at 39%, but FCC claims authority to kill the rule.
Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader who helped codify the 39 percent national TV ownership cap into statute, has weighed in against the FCC's plan to scrap it. His argument is straightforward and, on its face, legally sound: the cap is a number written into the Communications Act by Congress, not a figure the FCC chose for itself. Agencies do not get to repeal Congress's numerical limits simply because a new chairman finds them inconvenient.
The structural irony here is worth noting. DeLay is not a figure associated with media regulation. He is a partisan who helped write the law for entirely different reasons. That pedigree matters because it strips the argument of any obvious ideological coloring. When the author of a statute says the executive branch lacks authority to gut it, courts tend to listen.
The FCC under Brendan Carr is betting that the statutory text is flexible enough to permit reinterpretation, or that the political environment is permissive enough that no one will stop them. Carr's announcement came less than three weeks before the scheduled vote, a timeline that suggests the agency is more interested in momentum than in building a record that would survive judicial review.
Broadcasters have been lobbying to lift the cap for years, arguing that the modern media landscape makes a 39 percent threshold obsolete. That argument has merit as policy. It is a different argument as law. If Congress wanted to update the number, Congress could update the number. The FCC's claim of authority to do so unilaterally is the kind of administrative overreach that invites litigation and, more often than not, reversal.
For the labor market, the direct connection is thin. Media consolidation affects hiring at station groups, but the story here is about institutional boundaries rather than employment. The relevant audience is anyone who watches how agencies interpret the limits of their own power, because that pattern tends to repeat across sectors.