Cruz Backs Wilson After Resignation; Schatz Defends Khan

FTC Commissioner Christine Wilson’s resignation “raises significant questions about the agency’s direction and operations,” Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told us Wednesday.

Wilson announced her resignation Tuesday, citing FTC Chair Lina Khan’s “disregard for the rule of law and due process” (see 2302140069). Cruz called Wilson a “critical counterweight” at the agency: “I hope the two open Republican FTC slots can be filled quickly because the extreme partisanship at the FTC is leaving whole swaths of the U.S. economy vulnerable to Lina Khan’s activist agenda.”

Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, defended Khan. She's “doing extraordinarily well, and she’s doing a lot of things that are appreciated on a bipartisan basis,” which “is why she was confirmed expeditiously,” Schatz told us. “I’m quite sure [Wilson] is going to quit and land in the private sector at a company that hates what the FTC is doing on antitrust.”

Law students and academics are generating modern and novel ideas about antitrust policy, DOJ Antitrust Division Chief Jonathan Kanter told an Open Markets Institute event Wednesday. Khan, a former Columbia Law School scholar who rose to prominence with her academic work on Amazon’s dominance, was appointed chair at age 32. Modern law students are approaching antitrust policy with a “degree of common sense” that’s been missing for the past 30 years, said Kanter. More competition is better, he said, discussing the consumer welfare standard: If companies engage in behavior that restricts competition and further entrenches their power, that goes against plain statutory language, and they should be challenged, he said.

President Joe Biden “knocked it out of the park” when he appointed Khan and Kanter, said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., during a separate appearance at the Open Markets Institute event. Warren described Khan and Kanter as “two champions” who broke the cycle of rubber-stamping mergers. She credited the FTC for its litigation efforts to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook parent company Meta. And she credited DOJ for trying to separate Google’s online ad exchange from its search business.

The agencies can’t act alone, said Warren, urging Congress to take up bipartisan antitrust legislation that didn’t receive votes in 2022. There's demonstrated, bipartisan appetite to “rein in Big Tech,” she said, calling 2022 a missed opportunity.

It’s “deeply unfortunate” Khan and her Democratic majority “deprived” Wilson of the “ability to do her job and faithfully enforce the rule of law,” said U.S. Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President Neil Bradley. Her resignation shows the FTC is “in dire need of oversight.” Businesses and consumers “need an FTC that is transparent, accountable, and operates within the confines of the authority granted to it by Congress. Prompt confirmation of qualified nominees to the now two vacant commissioner seats is vital to that effort.”