FTC solves antitrust - there’s new bipartisan momentum that Khan is leveraging

When you're trying to restructure the entire American economy, you take your allies wherever you can find them. And so Lina Khan, the liberal chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, welcomes her growing group of Republican fans. "Antitrust and antimonopoly has historically been deeply bipartisan," Khan said in a recent interview in her spacious Washington office lined with 1920s political cartoons. "Conceptually, conservatives view concentration of power skeptically, and there has been a recognition that concentration of corporate power can in some instances be deeply antithetical to liberty." Since being appointed by President Biden three years ago, the 35-year-old Khan has turned the obscure federal agency into a high-profile battleship aimed at the big corporations she says have distorted markets and harmed consumers. Her aggressive actions against Big Tech and other industries have inflamed the business community, and not all have been successful. But in an anomaly in this partisan age, a group of conservatives has cheered her efforts, seeing her as a fellow traveler in the populist cause. The "Khanservatives," as they call themselves, tend to be younger and Trumpier, part of the growing ranks of Republicans who question unfettered markets and see big corporations as an adversary to their constituents. "As the Republican Party becomes more working class, we're less captive to the neolibertarian view that everything big business does to people is OK," said Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who has interviewed Khan on his Newsmax show. His party, he said, "can't be whores for big business and be the voice of the working class at the same time." Most Republicans, to be sure, aren't embracing Khan. House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan hauled her before the committee for a four-hour grilling in July, where he and other GOP representatives accused her of abusing power and bullying companies. "She has pushed investigations to burden parties with vague and costly demands without any substantive follow-through, or, frankly, logic, for the requests themselves," Jordan said. Khan also faces congressional investigations led by Republicans who charge she has abused her authority and violated ethics rules. Critics accuse her of creating roadblocks to economic activity that do nothing to benefit consumers. But the Khanservatives' ranks are growing—and some of her backers have speculated that if Trump wins this year's election, he could reappoint her. "I would hope," Gaetz said, "that whoever is the next FTC chair would continue many of the cases that Chair Khan has brought against predatory businesses." The bipartisan traction suggests Khan is tapping into a generational shift in attitudes toward corporations and markets. More Republicans are bucking their long alliance with big business and accusing corporations of hurting workers, stifling free speech and imposing a liberal agenda on employees and consumers. Their beefs with big business are different from liberals' focus on workers' rights and corporate greed, but on policy, the two sides sometimes end up in the same place. "We are at an inflection point," said Hannah Garden-Monheit, director of the FTC's office of policy planning, who left a top position in the Biden White House to join the agency she saw as the "tip of the spear" for economic justice. "There's a recognition that decades of laissez-faire has not worked for people, and antitrust and competition policy is the way we can hold large corporations accountable on behalf of working Americans." Rising on the right Khan has compiled a mixed record since her appointment. Some of her aggressive actions have failed as she seeks to reorient decades-old norms surrounding corporate mergers. The agency's suits challenging proposed acquisitions by Meta and Microsoft fizzled, and its much-hyped case accusing Amazon of creating an illegal monopoly faces uncertain prospects. (The agency is appealing the Microsoft decision.) Other actions have been successful. Courts have sided with the agency in recent actions against the biotech company Illumina and the drugmaker Sanofi, and other proposed mergers have fallen apart in anticipation of agency scrutiny. (Khan's backers call this "deterrence"; her critics term it a chilling effect.) Last month, the agency sued to block Kroger from acquiring the Albertsons grocery chain, the largest proposed supermarket merger in U.S. history. The companies targeted by the agency have denied they engaged in anticompetitive practices. Khan's rise on the right was apparent in early November, when she took the stage at an unlikely venue: the annual conference of the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal organization. She was one of just two members of the Biden administration to appear on the three-day program. Before Khan could begin, her interviewer, Todd Zywicki, a professor at the George Mason University School of Law, uncorked a rant that revealed the underpinnings of the right's romance with antitrust. In 2021, Zywicki said, he sued his employer for trying to force him to take the Covid vaccine. He had videos removed from YouTube for alleged misinformation and had been "shadow-banned" on Facebook, he said. He'd seen friends and colleagues vanish from Twitter or disappear from Google searches. (The companies have denied accusations that they discriminate against conservatives.) When like-minded allies tried to start their own social network, it was banned from app stores and driven out of business. "I'm sort of, I'd say, a market fundamentalist who's been mugged by reality over the last few years," Zywicki said. Khan responded with her spiel about the dangers of concentrated corporate power. "For those of us who care about liberty, who care about the rule of law, recognizing not just the ways in which state power can threaten those core values but the ways in which unchecked economic power can threaten those values" was a potential area of agreement, she said. After the talk, she was mobbed for selfies and stayed for a private lunch with a group of young society members. "If you didn't know she was working for the Biden administration, you wouldn't be able to tell," said one of the lunch attendees, Terence Herrick, an Omaha native and second-year Harvard Law student. "I think there is a lot of alignment with what we in the Federalist Society believe should be the right direction of our country." Some liberals have expressed angst at the outreach to the right by Khan and her allies. But Khan sees only upside in forging ties across the aisle. She has worked to cultivate these relationships, reaching out to employees of the Conservative Policy Institute for guidance before her 2021 Senate confirmation, which succeeded in getting 13 Republican votes. 'Picking up the baton' Conservative interest in antitrust policy has been percolating for years. Many younger conservatives reject the laissez-faire dogma of deregulation and open borders in favor of a muscular state that subordinates business prerogatives to the popular will, from Sen. Marco Rubio's call for "a pro-American capitalism…that promotes the common good, as opposed to one that prioritizes Wall Street and Beijing," to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's crackdown on Disney and "woke corporations." Khan has also won over Republicans by taking on causes dear to their hearts. She cracked down on "Made in America" frauds that hurt farmers and cattle ranchers who compete with fake imports. She sued a data-broker company for surveilling people on their way to church. And she pledged that she won't bend the rules to approve corporate mergers even if executives promise to improve environmental or diversity standards. The right's most prominent antitrust hawk is Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, a former Supreme Court clerk with degrees from Stanford and Yale. Before coming to Washington, the 44-year-old Hawley was the first state attorney general to bring an antitrust case against Google and also mounted an investigation of Facebook over data privacy. In the Senate, he has proposed multiple bills to strengthen antitrust enforcement, including legislation aimed at breaking up meatpacking monopolies, banning large corporate mergers, giving more power to the FTC and bolstering penalties for anticompetitive conduct. In an interview, Hawley said he likes the way Khan has aggressively enforced antitrust laws—a trend he argues began during the Trump administration. Under then-Attorney General William Barr, the Justice Department sued Google, bringing the department's first major monopolization case since the 1990s. "She has done a good job of picking up the baton and running with it," he said. The FTC section of this year's version of the Heritage Foundation's quadrennial policy blueprint for the next potential GOP administration, Project 2025, differs starkly from four years ago, calling for a more aggressive crackdown on large U.S. companies and industries like Big Tech. "We are witnessing in today's markets the use of economic power—often market and perhaps even monopoly power—to undermine democratic institutions and civil society," it states. The document, according to a person involved with its drafting, was the result of intense internal wrangling between conservative groups. The resulting text was so controversial that the authors acknowledge in the text that other conservative groups disagree with their views. In Congress and the courts, the Khanservatives are having an impact. In 2022, 39 Republicans voted for a bill that increased fees on corporations in order to provide more resources to the FTC and DOJ's antitrust division to review proposed mergers and acquisitions. Some conservative judges have shown openness to the FTC's novel legal approaches, including a recent opinion from the conservative Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirming the legitimacy of the agency's attacks on so-called vertical mergers, which combine complementary companies from different parts of the supply chain.