Yesterday the EU announced they would green-light Microsoft’s blockbuster $69 billion acquisition of game company Activision Blizzard.
Isn’t it pathetic that the Europeans are allowing a merger between two U.S. companies, but Biden’s own trust-buster-in-chief here at home, Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Kahn, is doing all she can to stop it? What a patriot.
Regular readers of the Hotline know that the 32-year-old Khan — a former leftist legal professor — knows absolutely nothing about how to build a business. But Biden picked her for this job because she knows a lot about how to tear them down. She’s getting clobbered in court routinely with her inventive legal theory that almost all mergers and acquisitions are de facto antitrust violations.
She lost her antitrust case against Meta earlier this year, and last year she got slapped down in the courts trying to stop a merger between drug companies Illumina and Grail.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page asked this question earlier this year: “Does Lina Khan ever win a single case?”
Her perfect record is still intact. But Khan argues that her constant harassment of mergers and the related millions of dollars of legal fees has a chilling effect on M&A activity – even though acquisitions are often the lifeblood of small entrepreneurial start-up companies. Cloistered in government and academia, Khan is oblivious to that reality.
2) TX Governor Abbott Goes All in on School Choice
We loved this headline from the Texas Tribune:
Here are the numbers. There are roughly 6.1 million school-aged children in all TX K-12 public schools. The Senate has laudably passed a near-universal choice bill with 5.1 million children eligible for an $8,000 payment for private/Christian or charter school expenses.
The House leadership proposed money for 4 million of these education accounts. But now a gang of rural House Republicans would shrink that number to 400,000 – and only kids who are special needs or attend schools rated F on performance. Really? Are C and D schools acceptable in Texas? Almost all the opponents of greater choices are coming from state representatives in districts where at most half the kids can read and write at grade-level proficiency.
Everything’s bigger in Texas - including education savings accounts.
3) Republicans Aren’t Caving on Non-Negotiable Work Requirements
Here's a welcome development.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Tuesday said work requirements for public assistance programs are a nonnegotiable in debt ceiling talks, laying out one of his first hard stances ahead of an afternoon meeting with President Biden and other top congressional leaders.
Asked whether work requirements were a “red line” for him in debt ceiling negotiations, McCarthy said: “Yes, it is.”
“When you’re talking about work requirements, remember what we’re talking about: Able-bodied people with no dependents,” McCarthy told reporters. “It’s 20 hours.”
McCarthy should stand strong.
It's good politics as well as good policy. It’s an 80-20 issue, so if Biden wants to shut down the government to stop workfare – he can be our guest. Work for welfare was on the ballot in the battleground state of Wisconsin last month, and here were the results:
