President Barack Obama has announced he intends to nominate Meredith Attwell Baker for a Republican position on the Federal Communications Commission. The 41-year-old Baker is the former head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and former point person on the government’s digital-TV-to-analog converter-box-coupon subsidy program.
If confirmed, Baker would be the last administration pick for the five-member FCC and take the Republican seat vacated by Deborah Taylor Tate. Baker had been with the NTIA since 2004, when she joined as a senior advisor.
Before joining the NTIA, Baker was vice president of Williams Mullen Strategies and, before that, director of congressional affairs at the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association. Her resume also includes working in the legislative-affairs office at the State Department. She is the daughter-in-law of former Secretary of State James Baker.
We reported recently Republicans on the Hill had settled on Baker and Robert McDowell as the GOP nominees to the commission. The Senate Commerce Committee has voted on McDowell’s re-nomination for a second term, as well as that of Obama Harvard law classmate and former Reed Hundt legal counsel Julius Genachowski for chairman.
The full Senate has not yet voted on McDowell and Genachowski’s nominations.
Obama has also nominated Mignon Clyburn, a South Carolina public service commissioner and the daughter of one of the most powerful members of Congress, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C. No nomination hearing has been set for Clyburn.
