Procedure and House Affairs committee  Good day to everyone there. Thank you for this opportunity. It's a great honour to be discussing this issue with all of you, and I hope this next hour will be a productive one. I have very brief opening thoughts to share, and then I look forward to having the greatest amount of t

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Social media essentially are media. They are commercial media companies. They have come onto the scene with a presence that has grown dramatically in the last few years. They play a significant role in engaging younger people in particular. One of the things we have tried to wres

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The media are inherently competitors. They all want each of us to come to their outlet to consume news, entertainment, or whatever kind of programming it is. It has been very important for us to make sure that every member of the media, whether they are new or old, print or ele

Procedure and House Affairs committee  You're looking at the permanent staff, Mr. Nater?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  At the moment, I have the great privilege of having an assistant that is running circles around me: we are it. We will have a grand total of maybe five people in the office when we are at full strength, but we have an outside production staff that has roughly seven key leaders

Procedure and House Affairs committee  They are independent.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Debate year to debate year, obviously, it goes up. There is a now a lot of security required, and it didn't used to be. In 2016 an individual debate cost just shy of $2 million, which, as those of you who are television experts know, is extremely inexpensive television. We raise

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's easy for us, Mr. Nater, because we in fact are not parties to the MOUs. That is a common misunderstanding. We have nothing to do with them. Quite often, the campaigns will do an MOU that addresses a variety of issues, including items such as what use can be made of debate fo

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The commission was the direct result of a study that was conducted at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in 1985, which was co-chaired by former secretary of defence Melvin Laird and former DNC party chairman Robert Strauss. It was a 40-person body that studied a

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Monsieur Dusseault, that is a very good question. The entity that had sponsored the debates in the three cycles before the commission was created was the League of Women Voters, which is also a not-for-profit. The league does lobbying and represents issues, and that gets into the

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It may surprise you to know that in 2016, approximately 150 people registered with the Federal Election Commission as candidates for president of the United States. We have criteria that are applied to anyone whose name has been registered with the FEC or who appears on any sin

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It was significantly more than 15%. If you would like the exact numbers, I would be happy to give them to you. They were both in excess of 40%.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Not only could that happen, it has happened. It was very interesting to read the testimony and the questions from the committee on that issue particularly, because the fact is that at the end of the day there's only one lever that matters in debates: what the public wants. When

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It would be the reverse of free speech. It would be mandated speech. The other concern that you can well imagine in this country is that if Congress got into the business of defining what a debate sponsor should look at, it would not stop with simply setting it up. It would com

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I do not because of what I was going to say, which is that I think it would actually make the process much more rigid. I think it would be irresistible for the legislative body not to put in a lot of detail about how many debates, what schedule, what format, and how they would be