Search Results for

August 02, 2023 | Revolving Door Project Newsletter
Following Failed Hearing, Jim Jordan And Republicans Try New Tacks To Take Down Khan and Kanter
Two weeks ago, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan entered a House Judiciary Committee hearing with a target on her back. In the leadup to the hearing, Republicans readied their trumped-up attacks against Khan and the agency she leads: a barely relevant memo from a conflicted ethics officer, a list of unfounded grievances from bitter former Commissioner Christine Wilson, and absurd defenses of Elon Musk’s lazy privacy practices at Twitter. But Khan emerged unscathed, and by the end, the Republicans had lost all their fire.
July 28, 2023
The Democratic Party Has Moved Past Larry Summers. Why Can’t The Media?
Reporters Need To Toss Outdated Rolodexes And Contact New Economic Minds. If Summers Can’t Even Stand Moderate Democratic Policy Priorities, How Can He Be A “Democratic” Talking Head?

July 26, 2023
It’s Time For “Union Joe” To Prove Himself
If Biden wants to keep his nickname and the working class vote, he needs to start listening to the unions.

July 21, 2023
Can We Keep This Anonymous?
Irresponsible press coverage isn’t limited to Washington as Hollywood journalists take cues from Trump’s White House Press Corps by providing anonymity to sources where there should be none

July 19, 2023
Ignoring Corporate Polluters Has a Human Cost. Regulators Must Stop Backing Down So Easily.
Measuring the impact of regulations and enforcement actions can be difficult, particularly as the benefits of such actions can take years to accrue. On the other hand, it’s often possible to observe the consequences of lax or nonexistent enforcement playing out in real time.

July 14, 2023
The Crypto Industry Thinks Gary Gensler Should Recuse Himself From Enforcement Actions.
If we were to agree to the industry’s demand that policy experts should be precluded from regulating issues they have spent significant amounts of time developing expertise in, we would be setting a precedent that severely undermines any kind of public-minded enforcement. In fact, banning experts such as Gensler would leave the public with a pool of potential regulators who are either already corporate-aligned or unqualified to adequately opine on pressing issues.

July 12, 2023 | Revolving Door Project Newsletter
Why Is The Administration Ignoring The Extreme Weather?
Extreme weather is the story of this summer so far, the hottest in 120,000 years. But you wouldn’t know it from following Beltway politics.
July 07, 2023 | Revolving Door Project Newsletter
The Supreme Legislature…Err…Court: It’s Getting Harder to Tell the Difference

July 05, 2023
Calling for a Corporate Crackdown, Not Lukewarm Apologism
With smog from fossil-fueled wildfires hanging in the Chicago air, Biden shared an underwhelming vision of corporate accountability as part of his “Bidenomics” platform.
June 30, 2023
Hack Watch: The Dangerous Cult Of The Entrepreneurial “Innovator”
It shouldn’t take a catastrophe for reporters to critically engage with entrepreneurial notions of so-called innovation.

June 28, 2023 | Revolving Door Project Newsletter
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 23, 2023 | Revolving Door Project Newsletter
Treat Alito Like The Hack He Is
Let’s take a step back and consider what it means for a Supreme Court Justice to respond to questions for a news article by publishing an angry opinion piece in a (very) different publication than the one which contacted him, and apparently without informing the journalists ahead of time.

June 21, 2023
In Case Of Emergency Spin Revolving Door
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.

June 16, 2023
Republican CFPB Opponents Are Crooked Corporate Shills
Every word from their mouths is paid for by Big Business. But the mainstream media won’t follow the money.

June 14, 2023
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.