Saul Loeb/Pool via AP
Lina Khan on Capitol Hill in April
I’ve covered lots of administrations, focusing on the regulation of capitalism. And I’ve never seen anything remotely like this.
Start with the resurrection of antitrust, left for dead after Robert Bork got through with it in the Reagan era. The incomparable Lina Khan heads the FTC, and another stalwart, Jonathan Kanter, will be assistant attorney general for antitrust.
Khan, while still in her 20s, wrote the authoritative law journal article on how antitrust could be applied to the big platform monopolies. And Kanter is the lawyer you retain when your company is being savaged by one the monopolies Khan describes. It doesn’t get any better.
Meanwhile, Tim Wu, one of the smartest big-picture competition policy people in the world, coordinates this stuff at the White House, while Bharat Ramamurti, former chief economic adviser to Elizabeth Warren, handles it at the National Economic Council. There has been nothing like this since the Roosevelt era.
The news is equally good on the financial regulation front, where one top job after another has gone to progressives. The latest two such posts about to be filled are Graham Steele to be assistant secretary of the treasury for financial institutions, and Saule Omarova to be comptroller of the currency, the key regulator of national banks.
This Treasury job, even under Democrats, usually goes to people congenial to Wall Street. Steele is different. He has been chief banking counsel to Sen. Sherrod Brown, and currently heads the Corporations and Society Initiative at Stanford Law School. He once worked for Public Citizen (yes, that Public Citizen.) He is a major proponent of tougher regulation under existing Dodd-Frank provisions, including greater attention to the risks in bank investments in carbon related industries.
The comptroller job has been vacant, following a center-versus-left standoff between the candidacies of Michael Barr, who had the assistant treasury secretary for finance job under Tim Geithner, and Mehrsa Baradaran, a progressive law professor at the University of California at Irvine, and author of two important books, How the Other Half Banks, and The Color of Money. In the end, neither got the job.
Omarova, who teaches banking law at Cornell, has been a critic of crypto-currency, and of the blurring of the traditional bright line between banking and commerce.
She has also written for the Prospect on the case for a National Investment Authority.
How did we get so fortunate? One can point to progressive loyalty to Biden, the evolution in Biden’s own thinking, and to the good work of a couple of invisible hands—namely those of Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown.
Some on the left are concerned that progressives have been too easily inclined to go along with Biden. Maybe that’s because progressives are winning—at least in areas such as top-level appointments where Biden is able to deliver.
Sixty votes in the Senate for progressive legislation? Biden’s on board, but that’s a little harder.
