Robert Bork’s Response to Louie Gohmert

May 15, 2025

Former Congressman Louie Gohmert in The Blaze accuses me of “borking” DOJ Trump Antitrust chief Gail Slater and the two Republican FTC commissioners – Andrew Ferguson and Mark Meador – by claiming they are enforcing radical, even “socialist,” antitrust policies.

Too bad my family doesn’t collect a small copyright fee every time our name is used as a verb. But I am not borking Ms. Slater and her colleagues. Mr. Gohmert shouldn’t confuse the full scorched earth and personal attacks on my father with what is fair criticism of an obvious continuation of the radical – and yes, socialist – policies of the previous Biden Administration.

It is true that in her Notre Dame speech, Ms. Slater offered a rousing defense of the “forgotten consumer” and promised to undertake “analysis of economic facts and data.” But a touchstone in a speech is not a policy. The intent of DOJ/FTC policy emerges from the joint merger guidelines of those two agencies.

As Reason magazine wrote, the current Biden-era guidelines “presume that ‘big is bad,’ using simplistic measures of the number and size of firms in a market as grounds to delay and potentially block mergers.” There is a reason why 17 former chief economists of the FTC and DOJ of both parties signed an open letter criticizing the Biden guidelines for ignoring “consensus economic understanding.”

Most telling of all, the Biden guidelines fail to even mention the consumer welfare standard, which roots antitrust enforcement in quantifiable economic analysis.

And in one of their first acts on the job, Ms. Slater and Mr. Ferguson agreed to continue that very radical Biden policy document without changes. They are content to offer guidelines to the courts without even a reference to the consumer welfare standard, one of the conservative movement’s great policy achievements, to date still the governing doctrine upheld by the courts.

At best, the America First Antitrust of Slater and Ferguson is a political slogan without economic analysis. It is a wholesale adoption of the Biden/Lina Khan approach that shuns the consumer welfare standard and only mentions consumers in three footnotes.

America First Antitrust waves the flag of populism and spouts wholesome words, without considering that the American consumer deserves to be protected first. That’s what we’ve had for 47 years until antitrust veered off into the fever swamps of the left. You would think that people who serve President Trump would see consumers first as a logical expression of the president’s political philosophy. Rather than course correct from the Biden Administration, Slater and Ferguson are continuing Biden’s actual policies.

Mr. Gohmert accuses me of trying to paint Gail Slater as the second incarnation of “Chairman Mao.” I am not. I am just pointing out that her substantive actions, and those of her colleague Andrew Ferguson, mark them as the second incarnations of Lina Khan.