Robert Bork Jr. writes for the Washington Examiner about a disturbing change proposed for antitrust actions.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), a newly reelected senator, on Thursday issued a public plea to President Joe Biden to twist the arm of the president’s fellow Democrat and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to include two liberal antitrust bills aimed at Big Tech companies in the omnibus spending bill.
We’ve seen stranger things in Washington, but this one is close to the top. Grassley, a lifelong conservative, is propelling forward pet legislation of liberal Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). It would be refreshing for conservatives and liberals to cooperate to pass needed legislation. But these two bills are inimical to a free market society and everything Republicans purport to stand for.
Start with Grassley’s support for Klobuchar’s American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with the vote of Grassley and some other Republicans. It is understandable why Republicans are upset at Big Tech. As the dump of internal Twitter machinations shows, large social media platforms actively discriminate against conservatism and Republicans. As the Twitter scandal also shows, markets eventually work, and the truth will out.
Out of justifiable pique against Twitter, Facebook, et al., Grassley and other Republicans are supporting Klobuchar’s bill without taking in the small print. This bill would subject U.S. businesses to death penalty fines of 15% of their revenues for violating vague, sloppily defined infractions. According to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), the language and definitions in the bill could soon bring a host of non-social media companies into the regulatory net of this bill, ranging from Kroger to Home Depot, as well as banks, financial service firms, and manufacturers.
The Klobuchar bill, widely seen as needed to kick off the Minnesota senator’s bid for the presidency, would create so many new causes of action against companies that it would effectively install Biden’s hyperaggressive Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan on the board of every large corporation in America.
