Joe Biden’s choice of chairperson for the Federal Trade Commission was a bold one: The antitrust prodigy Lina Khan, godmother of the “hipster antitrust” school that argued for a rethink of the last half-century of competition law. Khan, the millennial firebrand, represented something like an antitrust version of “drain the swamp.” But as happened the last time an outsider came to D.C. threatening to shake things up, D.C. has fought back. On Tuesday, not only did the lone remaining Republican commissioner at the agency resign, but she ripped Khan over and over again in a fiery Wall Street Journal op-ed that ran over a thousand words. “Consider this my noisy exit,” wrote Christine Wilson.
An attorney with deep ties to the Republican Party, Wilson was a commissioner at the agency since her appointment by former President Donald Trump in 2018. Not only was her exit noisy, but she labeled Khan a lawbreaker who habitually abused her power. Wilson claimed the FTC chair disregarded the rule of law as well as legal precedent, while pushing for the regulator to reach far beyond its mandated jurisdiction and authority. Wilson’s departure leaves the FTC without any Republicans among its leadership, since Noah Phillips, the second Republican commissioner who made up the traditional 3–2 split, stepped down in October. To Khan’s supporters, her disregard of decades of antitrust law and pushing the FTC into new jurisdictions is exactly the point.
