Senators got a chance to publicly grill Ajit Pai this morning for the first time since he was named FCC chairman, during an oversight hearing with the Senate Commerce Committee.

The hearing was a strangely quiet affair given how much is at stake inside the FCC. Senators only occasionally brought up net neutrality or plans to spike internet privacy protections, instead focusing largely on the commission’s more bipartisan and banal duties, like figuring out spectrum sharing and ways to deploy broadband to rural areas.

Pai opened the meeting far from the controversies, too. He took a minute to condemn the shooting of Garmin engineers in Kansas, where he grew up, saying that “words cannot capture how this has hurt those of us, particular…

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