CNN’s Tapper: Schumer, McConnell, Pelosi, McCarthy Protecting ‘Anti-American’ Big Tech Monopolies

CNN anchor Jake Tapper said Tuesday on his show “The Lead” that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) were protecting “anti-American” big tech monopolies.

Tapper said, “It can be more telling in what the congressional leaders left out of the massive $1.7 trillion spending bill unveiled today than what they included. I’m thinking of specifically two pieces of the bipartisan anti-trust legislation to try to rein in the big tech monopolies. One of the bills was bipartisan from Senators Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley. It would stop companies like Apple, Amazon, Meta and Google, which critics say are clearly monopolies, from giving preference to their own products, and burying other products.”

He continued,  “There is another bill from Marsha Blackburn that would loosen the stranglehold that comes to apps that allows them to crush competition.”

Tapper added, “Neither of these bills even got a vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Similar bills in the House were also denied votes on the floor of the House. The app store bill on the House did not even get marked up in its committee. Why? Well, often, the leaders deny the opportunity for votes for bills that they are afraid will actually pass. Sources familiar with this fight tell me that the congressional leaders, Democrats and Republicans seemed eager to run out the clock. Now it might be cynical to note the number relatives of members of Congress and former top staffers who have coincidentally found lucrative jobs in the tech sector, but it is certainly relevant to observe that these tech companies represent one of the biggest sources of campaign funds for the Democratic Party, which fancies itself as standing up for the little guy against corporate behemoths, but in this case not so much. It might also be worth observing that despite all the anti-big tech rhetoric we hear from Republicans, who are currently casting themselves as populists, very few Republicans, Grassley, Blackburn and Congressman Ken Buck excepted, seem at all interested in standing up to monopolies.”

He continued, “For these two bills, this was a ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ type slaughter. Everyone’s fingerprints are on the knife…The fingerprints of the leaders Schumer and McConnell, Speaker Pelosi, Leader McCarthy, plus a bunch of California House Democrats that represent big tech.”

Tapper concluded, “These big tech monopolies and their anti-competition, and dare I say anti-American way they govern the businesses, and I’m not talking about Twitter, but Apple, Google, and Amazon, and what they are doing is arguably a more important and significant story.”

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