Opinion ID: 185357
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Amendment Cut-Off

Text: 17 The Commission apparently intended the November 13, 1995, freeze to cut off amendments as well as applications. But the freeze order specified only the latter. See 11 F.C.C.R. 1156. Despite this oversight, the Commission, in the first Notice of Proposed Rule Making and Order it issued on December 15, 1995, stated that the November 13 freeze applied to amendments, except for a limited class of license modification amendments. See 11 F.C.C.R. at 4988-90. In its first Reconsideration Order, issued on January 17, 1997, the Commission changed the cut-off date for amendments of right from November 13, 1995, the application freeze date, to December 15, 1995, the date it promulgated the interim licensing procedures. 8 The Commission recognized that it was the December 15 order, not the November 13 order, that suspended any further action on these amendments. 12 F.C.C.R. at 2918. 18 The amendment cut-off precluded private resolution of mutual exclusivity after December 15, 1995. It was no longer possible for amendments (or, apparently, voluntary dismissals) to cure mutual exclusivity and render an application eligible for processing under the old regime. Appellants claim they had a substantive right to cure mutual exclusivity that may not be abrogated without notice and comment. Relying on Ashbacker, they insist that the right of competing applicants to simultaneous consideration under Ashbacker is a 'right of substance'  and that equally of substance is an applicant's right to avoid consolidated treatment and its unintended consequences by means of conflict-resolving minor amendments and voluntary dismissals. Brief for Appellants at 46. 19 The right to avoid consolidated treatment finds no support in Ashbacker or any other authorities the appellants have brought to our attention. The right to amend is no more substantive than the right to file an application in the first place, which we have previously held the Commission may suspend without notice and comment. See Kessler, 326 F.2d at 682; Neighborhood TV Co. v. FCC, 742 F.2d 629, 637 (D.C. Cir. 1984). Like the rules governing the filing of applications, rules permitting (or suspending) amendments are rules of agency organization, procedure, or practice exempt from the Administrative Procedure Act's notice and comment requirement. See 5 U.S.C. § 553(b)(A); James V. Hurson Assocs., Inc. v. Glickman, 229 F.3d 277, 280-82 (D.C. Cir. 2000); JEM Broad. Co. v. FCC, 22 F.3d 320, 326-28 (D.C. Cir. 1994) (FCC hard look rules prohibiting amendment did not require notice and comment: we conclude that a license applicant's right to a free shot at amending its application is not so significant as to have required the FCC to conduct notice and comment rulemaking, particularly in light of the Commission's weighty efficiency interests.); Maxcell, 815 F.2d at 1561 (stating but not deciding that a cut-off rule arguably may be understood as an 'interpretive' rule, a rule of agency 'procedure' or of agency 'practice', any of which is exempt from the notice and comment requirements). 20 We also reject appellants' claim that the amendment cut-off was arbitrary and capricious. 9 Appellants' panoply of argumentsin this regard reduce to a central premise: refusal to accept amendments after December 15, 1995, artificially preserved mutual exclusivity with respect to [39 GHz] applications, creating the fiction that applications that were mutually exclusive before December 15, 1995, remained so even after their frequency conflicts had been resolved in violation of Ashbacker. Brief for Appellants at 49-50 (emphasis omitted). Appellants read Ashbacker far too broadly. 10 In the Court's words: We only hold that where two bona fide applications are mutually exclusive the grant of one without a hearing to both deprives the loser of the opportunity which Congress chose to give him. Ashbacker, 326 U.S. at 333; see also Maxcell, 815 F.2d at 1561 (Ashbacker therefore simply is irrelevant to a situation where a license applicant complains that its application was not considered due to a 'regulation' that 'for orderly administration, requires an application ... to be filed within a certain date'.); Reuters, 781 F.2d at 951 (criticizing an attempt to bootstrap a fairness argument onto Ashbacker's narrow holding). Ashbacker constrains only the grant of mutually exclusive applications; it does not touch the Commission's authority to dismiss or suspend amendments of mutually exclusive applications.