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June 28, 2023 | Revolving Door Project Newsletter

Hannah Story Brown

Newsletter Government CapacityTreasury Department

Eighteen Months To Avoid Another X-Date

Earlier this month, Politico reported that after Biden secured his debt ceiling deal—a deal whose poison pills we’ll still be unpacking for some time to come—he went quiet on exploring options to permanently get rid of the debt ceiling.

This goes against what the president promised agitated members of his own party who urged him to take any manner of executive branch routes to resolve the crisis without capitulating to Republican demands: that it was his “hope and intention” to “find a rationale to take it to the courts to see whether or not the 14th Amendment is, in fact, something that would be able to stop it.” And it sets us up for another protracted, exhausting, damaging tête-à-tête at the edge of a fiscal cliff in just eighteen months.

June 14, 2023

KJ Boyle

Newsletter Anti-MonopolyBigLawDepartment of JusticeFTCIndependent AgenciesRevolving Door

Christine Varney Made A Career Out Of An Agency She Now Deems Unconstitutional

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. 

June 08, 2023

Andrea Beaty

Press Release Anti-MonopolyEthics in GovernmentFTCRevolving Door

PRESS RELEASE: Revolving Door Lawyers Aim To Dismantle Antitrust Enforcement Authorities

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.

June 07, 2023

Emma Marsano

Newsletter

Corporate Crackdown

Deadly Corporate Misconduct Can Be Boring. Biden Must Keep His Focus on Cracking Down, Anyway.

Corporate wrongdoing doesn’t always resemble the stories that tend to make headlines—the dramatic corruption scandals, bald-faced lies, and egregious instances of fraud. Sometimes, as we at Revolving Door Project strive to highlight, life-threatening corporate actions are enabled by quiet bureaucratic processes and decisions, ushered along by captured political appointees who refuse to hold profit-hungry corporations accountable.