Conservatives Support Aggressive FTC Nominee

Conservatives Support Aggressive FTC Nominee

Politics

Several names have been proposed for the Republican-designated position.

A coalition of conservative advocacy groups sent a letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday with a list of policy priorities for the new Republican commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The letter was spearheaded by American Principles Project with cosigners from Heritage Action for America and the Internet Accountability Project. It expresses hope McConnell will consider selecting a nominee “who has shown throughout their careers a willingness to face the unchecked strength of the most powerful Big Tech corporations, particularly given the way these companies have used their market power to directly interfere our free and fair election .”

In a report published today by Communications Daily, several names are being floated around for the position: Olivia Trusty, a longtime staffer of Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker and the policy director at the Senate Media and Broadband Subcommittee; Crystal Tully, also a Wicker staffer and the deputy staff director at the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee; Mark Meador, deputy chief counsel for antitrust and competition policy to Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee; Josh Divine, chief counsel to Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley; Rachel Bissex, senior counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee; and Svetlana Gans, an attorney at Gibson Dunn.

This comes after the resignation of Noah Joshua Phillips, Republican Commissioner to the Commission. Federal law states that “not more than three Commissioners shall belong to the same party.” Phillips is one of these three Democrats.

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McConnell is the leader of the Republican Conference and serves as President Biden’s primary adviser for Phillips’s Republican successor. Phillips, nominated by President Trump and confirmed by the Senate by voice vote, is serving a term that is set to expire in September 2023; whoever succeeds the vacancy left by Phillips will only be appointed for the remainder of this term. The same law states that commissioners will continue to serve up to the time that a replacement is appointed and confirmed by Senate.

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Phillips’s resignation came just days before the FTC requested public comment on “Commercial Surveillance and Data Security Rulemaking.” Phillips dissented to the Commission’s request for public comment, saying, “Congress–not the Federal Trade Commission – is where national privacy law should be enacted.” At an event at the American Enterprise Institute last month, the commissioner criticized Biden’s July 2021 executive order on “Promoting Competition in the American Economy,” saying, “the scope of our current rulemaking authority is almost limitless… We’re now just making rules for the economy in a way that’s out of line with precedent.”

The regulatory agency is chaired by Lina Khan, the antitrust hawk who published the now-famous 2017 article in the Yale Law Journal titled, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” Khan considers herself to be a member of the ‘New Brandeis’ movement, a collection of scholars and activists who, according to the chairwoman, “believe the political economy is structured only through law and policy” and “do not recognise any form of organisation or any type of power as inevitable.”

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Whomever McConnell suggests to Biden that he nominate. The new Republican commissioner, who will serve either as an occasional foil or occasional alligator of Khan’s unquestionably definite priorities, will be used by Biden.

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