Two events worth noting took place this week on Capitol Hill. First, Representatives Mark Pocan (D-Wisc) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) reintroduced the Surveillance State Repeal Act (HR 1466). This bill would completely roll back all provisions of the Patriot Act and abolish the NSA’s right to engage in the mass surveillance of Americans that it has maintained in the 14 years since 9/11.

The SSRA is refreshingly straightforward. In addition to repealing the Patriot Act, it mandates the destruction of “any information collected under the USA PATRIOT Act…and the amendments made by such Act, as in effect the day before the date of the enactment of this Act, concerning a United States person that is not related to an investigation that is actively ongoing on such date.”

It further repeals the FISA amendments of 2008 — a critical step, since programs like PRISM and other data collection activities were actually authorized under this statute. This is the law that gave companies like AT&T retroactive immunity from spying on Americans, and made it a crime for individual states to investigate or prosecute the telecoms for this behavior. The new bill would also increase the number of judges serving on the FISA courts, and mandate that:

“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Federal Government shall not mandate that the manufacturer of an electronic device or software for an electronic device build into such device or software a mechanism that allows the Federal Government to bypass the encryption or privacy technology of such device or software.”

In short, this is precisely the kind of law that Congress ought to pass to end the mass surveillance of Americans and stop the abuses of the NSA. Its odds of passing are… infinitesimal.

And now for something depressingly familiar

The other event of note was actually yesterday, but it speaks to the ongoing battle over net neutrality and the staggering levels of dysfunction that are the new normal within the federal government. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai spoke to the House of Representatives on Tuesday, and took the unusual step of requesting that Congress forbid the FCC from using any appropriated funds to enforce its net neutrality ruling.

In his remarks, Pai stated that “absent outside intervention, the Commission will expend substantial resources implementing and enforcing regulations that are wasteful, unnecessary, and affirmatively detrimental to the American public. Heavy-handed regulation does not come cheap. The FCC has already wasted millions of dollars developing these regulations, and we are on course to waste millions more each year on this unprecedented governmental power-grab.”

This is merely the latest attack on the FCC’s ruling — the GOP has previously attempted to claim that Obama unfairly influenced the new net neutrality rules, and proposed multiple pieces of legislation that would strip the FCC’s authority to actually enforce net neutrality at all. Some of these bills have attempted to carve out space for net neutrality legislatively, some have not. What they and Commissioner Pai share is a view in which the principle responsibility of the FCC is to businesses — not citizens.

Let’s assume that Commissioner Pai is correct that the FCC’s rules are a burden to the 4,462 ISPs his letter references — even though some of those ISPs have already supported or remained neutral on the FCC’s proposals. What Pai fails to explain or even address is why the desires of those ISPs should automatically trump the desires of the American people to be provided with decent customer service, fair prices, reasonable repair times, reliable fulfillment of contract terms, municipal broadband (should they choose to fund it), and, lest we forget — affordable broadband Internet.

One common argument for why US broadband speeds and availability lag the rest of the world is that the United States’ population density is simply much lower than these other countries. The Open Technology Institute’s 2014 report on the state of US broadband, which offers data broken down by city, dispels this notion. The report is vast and offers a great many graphs at various price points, but the following is indicative of how the US generally ranks:

At $50 (evaluated via purchasing power parity), the US doesn’t just lag Hong Kong, Seoul, and Tokyo — we lag London, Prague, and Dublin with speeds that are a fraction of what other countries provide as a matter of course. At 25Mbps, the only US cities remotely competitive with the international market are Google Fiber cities.

Despite these objective, factual standings, Commissioner Pai is quick only to assert the rights of the corporation over the individual. Special interest groups like ALEC write and submit anti-municipal broadband legislation in statehouses, despite the wishes of those same communities is government functioning as it ought. Meanwhile, any effort by the federal government to restore the right of self-determination to municipalities is considered unconstitutional overreach.

At some point, the burdens ISPs have collectively imposed on Americans — in the form of high prices and poor service — have to outweigh the billions of subsidies, government-granted monopolies, and special-interest funded anti-competitive legislation that these same corporations have rammed through state legislatures. Commissioner Pai’s remarks and the general attitude of the GOP, however, suggest that day will be a long time coming.