Jim Jordan Misfires in Attacks on Lina Khan [View all]

[BeckyDem]

House Judiciary Committee Republicans didn’t follow Jordan in his assaults on Khan’s ethics. Some Republicans even praised her.

BY DAVID DAYEN JULY 14, 2023


As Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan entered the House Judiciary Committee hearing room on Thursday, every expectation was that she would face a grilling, along the lines of what FBI director Christopher Wray experienced the day before. And it did start out that way, with committee chair Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and his allies hammering on two familiar subjects: whether Khan ignored an ethics official’s advice in declining to recuse in a merger case involving Meta, and whether Khan overstepped boundaries in seeking information from Twitter about releases of personal user data to journalists.

But as the hearing went on, Republican committee members either moderated their rhetoric or even expressed support for her actions at the FTC. Some started asking about specific cases of monopolistic conduct, from pharmacy benefit managers to grocery chains. The vast majority of Republicans stayed away from Jordan’s line of inquiry. And even where they disagreed with Khan, it was relatively substantive. Remarkably, it became an actually interesting hearing—at times a bipartisan inquiry into various aspects of corporate power, a faint glimmer of actual congressional work on a committee characterized often by spin and shouting.



In the end, the hearing showed that Jordan, in attempting to link his broader critique of the weaponization of government to Khan’s work at the FTC, didn’t have buy-in from his colleagues. If this was supposed to be a springing of a trap, the trap didn’t spring. Jordan’s ambush turned disastrous for him.

https://prospect.org/power/2023-07-14-jim-jordan-misfires-attacks-lina-khan/

( Lina is hitting it out of the ballpark. )