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August 02, 2023 | Revolving Door Project Newsletter

Andrea Beaty

Newsletter Anti-MonopolyCongressional OversightDepartment of JusticeFTCGovernment Capacity

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 14, 2023

Timi Iwayemi

Hack WatchNewsletter CryptocurrencyEthics in GovernmentFinancial Regulation

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.

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.