Scott Fitzgerald Corruption & Ethics Controversy Wisconsin

The Green Bay Packers Say Their Own Congressman Is Threatening Them. He Called Their Concerns "Laughable."

Scott Fitzgerald chairs the House antitrust subcommittee and is leading a push to rewrite the 1961 law that lets the NFL pool its TV money. The Packers — the only community-owned team in American sports — say that law is why they still exist.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 11, 2026

The Green Bay Packers Say Their Own Congressman Is Threatening Them. He Called Their Concerns "Laughable."

In June 2026, the Green Bay Packers did something a professional sports franchise almost never does. They issued a public statement attacking a sitting member of Congress from their own state, by name, and told their fans to be offended by him.

The congressman is Scott Fitzgerald, who represents Wisconsin's 5th District.

Here is what the Packers said:

"Packers fans everywhere should be deeply concerned that Rep. Fitzgerald admitted to giving 'zero' consideration to keeping the Packers in Green Bay as he explores upending the 65-year-old Sports Broadcasting Act. Fans should be offended that Fitzgerald then went further, saying our concerns were 'laughable.' What is laughable is that a congressman from Wisconsin is leading this charge. Why threaten the team his community overwhelmingly cherishes and its ability to compete on a level playing field?"

What the fight is actually about

Fitzgerald chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust. That job gives him the gavel over antitrust law, and he has pointed it at the National Football League.

On June 8, 2026, his committee released a 27-page report called "The Sports Broadcasting Act: A Special-Interest Antitrust Exemption Gone Awry." Two days later he ran a hearing on it.

The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 is a narrow exception to antitrust law. It lets the teams in a league sell their television rights as one bloc instead of competing against each other for TV deals. Every NFL team then splits that national money evenly — $432 million per club in fiscal 2025.

Fitzgerald's complaint is about what fans have to pay. He posted in April that "Wisconsin sports fans should have access to their teams' games without having to pay for multiple cable and streaming packages." His committee's report says the NFL has stretched that 1961 exemption past its limits, that its whole TV structure is "a house of cards built on an overstretched antitrust exemption," and that the league turned down an ESPN offer to sell Sunday Ticket at $70 because it was too cheap.

That is a real consumer grievance. Anyone who has tried to watch their team this decade knows it.

Why the Packers, specifically, are terrified of it

Here is the part Fitzgerald has not answered.

Green Bay is the smallest market in American professional sports, by the team's own account. The Packers have no billionaire owner. They have been a publicly owned, nonprofit corporation since 1923 — 5,204,625 shares held by 538,967 stockholders, none of whom receives a dividend, and no one of whom is permitted to own more than 200,000 shares.

The reason a town that size can field a team that competes with New York and Los Angeles is precisely the thing Fitzgerald is investigating. Pooled national TV rights, split evenly, mean Green Bay gets the same television check as the Giants.

Take that apart and let teams sell their own broadcast rights, and the market decides. In that world, the Packers are a small-market team with no owner to write checks.

The Packers put it this way:

"The tremendously successful model of pooling media rights and sharing revenue equally amongst teams has allowed the Packers to survive and thrive in the smallest media market in professional sports. This model is as foundational to the Packers' existence as the very bricks in Lambeau Field. It is careless and unwise to rearrange the bricks of a foundation which has stood strong for over half a century."

His answer was that they're being hysterical

On June 14, Fitzgerald went on WISN's UpFront and was asked about the Packers' objections. He said:

"That's absolutely ridiculous and almost laughable, that is absolutely the Packers going for kind of hair on fire, oh my gosh, the world's coming to an end if this would be tweaked."

He did not explain how the revenue-sharing model survives the change he's proposing. He said the Packers would "be fine."

According to the team's own statement, he also acknowledged giving zero consideration to keeping the Packers in Green Bay while pursuing this.

That's the whole problem in one word. A congressman from Wisconsin, holding the gavel, taking apart the arrangement that keeps Wisconsin's team in Wisconsin, and telling the team it's being dramatic when it says so.

Who's on the other side of this fight

Rewriting the Sports Broadcasting Act isn't a fight between fans and the NFL. It's a fight between the NFL and the companies that distribute its games — the cable operators and the streaming platforms who would rather buy rights team by team than take the league's terms.

Those companies fund Scott Fitzgerald. This election cycle, according to FEC records, his campaign has taken $10,000 from Amazon's PAC — Amazon has held the exclusive streaming rights to Thursday Night Football since 2022, the very kind of paywalled deal his report criticizes — plus $5,000 from Charter Communications and $2,500 from Comcast NBCUniversal.

We're not going to claim that money bought this investigation; nothing in the record shows that. But it is worth knowing that the congressman leading the charge against the NFL's TV arrangement is funded in part by the companies that stand to buy the pieces.

He's done this before

Fitzgerald has a long record of using procedure to override outcomes people in Wisconsin thought were settled. After Wisconsin voters elected Democrats to every statewide office in 2018, he — then State Senate Majority Leader — led the lame-duck session that stripped powers from the incoming governor and attorney general and cut early in-person voting, a provision a federal judge later struck down. We laid out that record, and his January 6 votes, in 3 Things to Know About Scott Fitzgerald.

The pattern isn't the policy. It's the posture: he decides what's good for Wisconsin, and when Wisconsin says otherwise — voters, a court, or the most beloved institution in the state — the answer is that Wisconsin is overreacting.

The Packers have sold stock to their own fans six separate times since 1923 to stay alive. They think this is a threat. Their congressman thinks that's laughable.

One of them has more at stake than the other.