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Mark Rohrbaugh, a mid-level staffer at the National Institutes of Health, has consistently blocked the use of march-in rights to seize patents on high-cost drugs.

Despite venture capitalists, investment pundits, and other crypto firms alike all acknowledging that the jig is up, regulatory revolvers remain undeterred in their willingness to lend their reputations, expertise, credibility, and relationships to keep the crypto con alive.

Every word from their mouths is paid for by Big Business. But the mainstream media won’t follow the money.

Republicans inadvertently expose their own corruption while attacking an upstanding public servant.

By focusing on the (inflated) total defrauded, reporters are using big-sounding numbers without any context to try to scare the public.

Implicit in the worldview of these revolvers is the idea that corporations should be free to operate and acquire competitors with near impunity, therefore antitrust enforcement should be as narrowly tailored as possible. This is obviously problematic — we need regulators that believe in the government’s ability to take on corporations with outsized market influence — but Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s Christine Varney recently took things many steps further in her representation of the biotech company Illumina in its case against the FTC. Varney doesn’t just attack specific enforcement actions as unwarranted, but calls into question the constitutionality of the FTC’s authority to issue enforcement actions in the first place. 

Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s Christine Varney, a former head of the US Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, and other BigLaw lawyers representing Illumina and Grail filed a brief this week seeking to secure a merger which the FTC said would “diminish innovation in the U.S. market” for cancer detection tests. Revolving Door Project Research Director Andrea Beaty released the following statement concerning the brief and its authors.

Does former corporate lobbyist Anna Gomez stand for Big Telecom or a free and open internet?

As the past six years have clearly illuminated, hollowing out government capacity and rewarding loyalists is at the heart of the Trump gospel, and leveraging power is DeSantis’s modus operandi as well. As coverage of the Republican primaries ramps up, the press must focus on how this style of executive branch mismanagement endangers democracy and the public interest. That’s more important than trying to figure out if DeSantis has the personality to sell this anti-democratic vision.