When the new Congress takes office in January, Hollywood will have lost at least four staunch allies in the House of Representatives. Three co-sponsors of the Stop Online Piracy Act lost their seats in Tuesday's election. A fourth declined to run for another term.
According to Congress' official legislative website THOMAS, the Stop Online Piracy Act received a total of 31 co-sponsors. Eight of these representatives withdrew their support after January's historic protest against the legislation, leaving 23 members of Congress who stood by Hollywood in the face of an intense public backlash. Of those 23, three members of Congress, all from Hollywood's backyard in Southern California, lost in Tuesday's election.
The boundaries between Congressional districts were redrawn in 2012, a once-a-decade process. As a result, a number of incumbents who had traditionally enjoyed safe seats suddenly found themselves in competitive races with voters who had never voted for them before. In some cases, incumbents were forced to compete against each other.
Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) were two such unlucky incumbents. California has an unusual "open primary" system in which all candidates compete in a single primary and the top two vote-getters go on to the general election, regardless of party. Berman and Sherman were both supporters of SOPA, so when the re-districting forced them to face each other, Hollywood was guaranteed to lose an ally. Sherman won the race, throwing Berman out of Congress.
Mary Bono Mack, a Republican, lost her seat the old-fashioned way: to a newcomer from the opposite party. Mack is the widow of entertainer and politician Sonny Bono. After her husband died in a skiing accident in 1998, Mack ran for his seat, was elected, and led the fight for the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act later that same year. It retroactively extended copyright terms by 20 years, ensuring that no new works would fall into the public domain before 2018. On Tuesday, she lost her seat to Democrat Raul Ruiz by a margin of 51 percent to 49 percent.
The third casualty was Joe Baca (D-CA). The seven-term congressman was soundly defeated by another Democrat, State Senator Negrete McLeod, by a 56 percent to 44 percent margin. According to the Los Angeles Times, McLeod benefitted from $3 million spent on her behalf by a Super PAC associated with billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
A fourth member of Congress from Southern California who will not be returning next year is Rep. Elton Gallegly. Like many of his fellow members of Congress from the greater Los Angeles area, Gallegly was an original SOPA co-sponsor. He announced on January 5 that he would not be seeking re-election.
Two other one-time SOPA supporters, Rep. Tim Holden (D-PA) and Rep. Ben Quayle (R-AZ) will not be returning for the new Congress. Both candidates initially co-sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act but withdrew their support after January's Internet backlash. And both were defeated in primary challenges earlier this year.
We'd love to attribute the defeat of Mack and Baca to their support for the Stop Online Piracy Act. But we haven't seen any evidence that this is the case. Bono's opponent criticized her for supporting the spending proposals of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), which she claimed would undermine Medicare. The race between Berman and Sherman focused on issues such as trade and housing. McLeod got support from Bloomberg's Super PAC in part because she supported stricter gun laws. And 19 other SOPA co-sponsors, including the lead sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX), won re-election.
Still, losing at least four allies in the House of Representatives can't have been a positive development for the motion picture industry.
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