Any mainstream Democrat would have balked at Warren’s antitrust agenda as recently as five years ago.
Warren’s biggest win has been the Biden administration’s weaponization of antitrust law.
M ore than 51 million Americans watched Joe Biden stumble through the debate with Donald Trump. Biden’s performance left many wondering: Who has really been running the country since 2021?
A review of key administration actions shows that Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and her collection of far-left staffers have shrewdly capitalized on Biden’s deterioration to hijack the administration’s policy agenda. From key perches within the executive branch, in Congress, and at agencies, these staffers have pulled the levers of power to deliver on Warren’s campaign promises in Biden’s name.
Given that Warren exited the 2020 Democratic primary after finishing third in her home state of Massachusetts, it is easy to forget that the mainstream media once considered Warren the front-runner for the nomination. Warren’s endorsement helped Biden win by consolidating the progressive wing of the party behind his campaign.
After Biden won, Warren got to work securing a return on her investment. Warren’s biggest win has been the Biden administration’s weaponization of antitrust law.
Warren ran on a platform of breaking up Big Everything, putting federal bureaucrats in charge of large swaths of the economy through aggressive misuse of antitrust law. Antitrust allows unelected bureaucrats to dismantle, punish, or regulate companies that they believe are harming competition.
For decades, the consumer-welfare standard has anchored antitrust enforcement, which properly restricts the government’s power to break up or reshape businesses only if they harm consumers. Warren has long advocated for overturning this critical constraint on one of the government’s greatest powers. The far-left wants bureaucrats to break up companies that progressives believe are too large — or whose decisions they dislike — without regard for consumer harm.
Warren wants to import the European approach to competition policy, which gives powerful regulators the ability to bend companies to their preference. Warren has endorsed that worldview, including legislation like the “Digital Markets Act,” a law that gives unelected European bureaucrats the power to dictate how American companies design their products and extract tens of billions of dollars from American shareholders through crippling fines.
Warren fails to consider that only a small handful of Europe’s top 100 companies were founded in the last four decades, a likely result of Europe’s “big is bad” antitrust philosophy. Instead of innovating to catch up with American companies, European bureaucrats have decided to drag American companies down to their level with new regulations. It makes sense why a European politician would impose this regime to weaken America’s world-leading companies. No American politician should buy into this.
It is worth noting that any mainstream Democrat would have balked at Warren’s antitrust agenda as recently as five years ago. The consumer-welfare standard has enjoyed bipartisan support since its adoption by the Supreme Court, with both Democratic and Republican-appointed Justices applying its objective framework to antitrust cases. In 2015, Obama’s Federal Trade Commission approved a bipartisan policy statement that affirmed the agency’s commitment to the consumer-welfare standard when exercising its “unfair methods of competition” authority.
To weaponize any form of government power, you need to install bureaucrats in key agencies that know how the levers of power work. Warren understood this, and was so successful at securing Biden administration jobs for her acolytes that she was dubbed the administration’s “most influential voice” in a Politico article.
At the same time, Warren allies were pushing sweeping new rewrites of antitrust law on Capitol Hill. Biden appointed key Warren ally Rohit Chopra to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency he helped Warren create. Biden installed longtime Warren aide Bharat Ramamurti as deputy director of the National Economic Council, guiding competition policy. Warren also pushed for the installation of far-left academic Tim Wu as an adviser, and she supported corporate attorney Jonathan Kanter to lead the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.
Warren’s greatest win was installing progressive activist Lina Khan as Federal Trade Commission Chair. Khan began her career at a far-left activist group, and then briefly served as a legal fellow under Chopra when he was an FTC commissioner. Khan was a staff member at the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee under the leadership of Representative David Cicilline (D., R.I.), where she falsely claimed the title of “counsel” without being a licensed attorney. Cicilline and Khan carried out a partisan “investigation” that accused American technology firms of violating antitrust law. Cicilline followed his witch hunt with Warren-supported legislation that would have imposed new regulations on businesses over a government-determined size. As one critic stated, “The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would be better named the Lina Khan Empowerment Act.”
Khan and Kanter have launched speculative and fantastically expensive lawsuits to break up many of the same companies that Warren has railed against, namely Amazon, Google, Meta, and Apple. One of Khan’s first acts was rescinding the 2015 policy statement affirming the FTC’s commitment to the consumer-welfare standard. The FTC and DOJ recently announced new antitrust probes into artificial intelligence, something Warren publicly urged. The FTC has even revived enforcement of a Great Depression-era antitrust law that has historically raised consumer prices, another genius Warren idea. All of the Biden administration’s antitrust activity inches us closer to Warren’s goal of importing European competition policy.
Biden promised moderation and unification. But Warren’s group of extreme partisans have run roughshod over the country with Biden as a willing accomplice. Time after time, when offered the chance to steer away from the most radical far-left positions on economic policy, Warren-linked bureaucrats in the Biden administration have turned the wheel leftward.