So Commr. McDowell is rumored to be walking the halls of Congress taking political temperatures about what he should do in connection with the AT&T/BellSouth merger.

McDowell used to work for Comptel, where he would have opposed such a merger, but Chairman Martin thinks (and has persuaded the FCC GC) that federal ethical guidelines that would require McDowell not to vote on the merger can be waived -- because there's a 2-2 tie among the remaining four Commissioners.

I can't imagine being McDowell's shoes -- being forced by political pressure to vote on something that an applicable set of ethical guidelines says you shouldn't vote on.  Excruciating.  No matter what he does, he looks awful to some large group of anxious and persuasive people with whom he frequently interacts. 

So here's the out.  If he can't stay recused, he can look to empirical evidence as to whether the merger will improve the public welfare -- and that evidence suggests that the merger is not in the public interest.  Blogged here by David Isenberg, it's a study by Sumit Majumdar of UT-Dallas:

We find that the approval of the mergers in the past have clearly led to welfare losses for the American consumer. The approval of the ATT&T and SBC merger will lead to further substantial negative economic consequences for hundreds of millions of American consumers. Approval of the merger is not in the public interest. The local exchange sector has been re-consolidated and re-monopolized a generation after the divestiture of the original AT&T in 1984. Today’s lack of productive efficiency and technological progressiveness, particularly with respect to the deployment of broadband and network digitalization, of the merged US comjpanies means that the welfare of the US consumer has been significantly compromised in perpetuity.  To ensure that no forther compromises are engendered, and overall compromises exacerbated, the AT&T and SBC merger should not be approved by the FCC.