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jim jordan
Big Tech’s Most Effective Lobbyist, Jim Jordan, Is Temporarily Constrained
The House Judiciary Committee under Jordan has not merely diverged from bipartisan concerns over corporate power, it has helped neutralize any meaningful legislative solutions by redefining the very nature of the threat.
Oct 12, 2025
A silver lining of the current government shutdown is that Rep. Jim Jordan can no longer use his position as chair of the House Judiciary Committee to waste taxpayer dollars lobbying for the most powerful technology corporations.
The most recent example of this waste was a nearly five-hour hearing in which Rep. Jordan (R-Ohio) gave the United Kingdom’s Nigel Farage a platform on Capitol Hill to attack Britain’s efforts to protect children online and the European Union's efforts to address the dominance of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Booking, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft in European digital markets. Also discussed were European efforts to set ground rules for digital information ecosystems. The hearing produced fireworks and sound bites about “authoritarian” speech policing. It was a performative act dressed up as oversight.
Are these laws perfect? No. Do they apply in the United States? No. Should we be spending taxpayer dollars to lobby for trillion-dollar companies abroad? No. Yet, Jim Jordan has been traveling the world on our dime to lobby for Big Tech in the name of protecting “free speech.”
This shift from antitrust to anti-woke is a gift to Big Tech.
House Republicans keep promising a crusade against Big Tech’s power. If they were serious, they would likely find support from their Democratic colleagues.
The industry's greatest vulnerability lies in the economic arguments against the harms of market concentration—arguments supported by a growing body of evidence and bipartisan concern. The industry’s greatest strength, however, lies in its ability to reframe any regulatory effort as a politically charged battle over the First Amendment.
The House Judiciary Committee under Jim Jordan has not merely diverged from bipartisan concerns over corporate power and its harms to children. It has become the perfect rhetorical counteroffensive by helping neutralize any meaningful legislative solutions by redefining the very nature of the threat. Where most see a market failure requiring economic intervention, the House Judiciary Committee under Chairman Jim Jordan alleges political persecution requiring investigations into government "weaponization." This redefinition is the single most valuable outcome a regulated industry could hope for from its oversight body, transforming a legislative threat into a political shield.
Where is the House Judiciary Committee that conducted a landmark 16-month investigation into the market power of Apple, Amazon, Facebook (now Meta), and Google?
That bipartisan investigation—spanning seven hearings and nearly a million documents—produced broad consensus on the problems affecting these markets, and the need for more resources for antitrust enforcement.
That is the hard work of governing. What Jim Jordan has delivered instead is theater.
The result is that the real work of promoting open markets where everyone has a fair shot remains unfinished. Congress could pass legislation to address the monopoly power that allows Apple and Google to control our smartphones, Amazon to exploit small businesses and consumers, and Meta to operate with little regard for the welfare of our children.
None of this requires viral hearings. House Republicans keep promising a crusade against Big Tech’s power. If they were serious, they would likely find support from their Democratic colleagues. Few issues have managed to forge the kind of bipartisan consensus seen in the effort to rein in the monopolistic power of the largest corporations.
Unfortunately, that seems unlikely under the leadership of Jim Jordan.
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After Reporting and Backlash, Republicans Drop Sneaky Effort to Gut FTC—For Now
"We applaud Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee that stood up against his harmful proposal to ensure this amendment landed where it belongs—on the cutting room floor," said one antitrust advocate.
May 01, 2025
House Republicans on Wednesday dropped an effort to hamstring the Federal Trade Commission's ability to fight corporate consolidation after antitrust advocates, Democratic lawmakers, and news outlets—including Common Dreams—highlighted and sounded the alarm over the proposal.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, agreed during a markup hearing Wednesday to remove the proposal from the panel's section of the GOP's sprawling reconciliation package—though he indicated he would try to revive the proposal as a standalone bill at a later date.
The reversal came after Democrats on the panel, including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Becca Balint (D-Vt.), ripped the proposal as a disaster for small businesses and consumers.
"Why would you go after the FTC and make it harder for small businesses to survive in this landscape?" Balint asked in fiery remarks at Wednesday's hearing. "You all talk about competition... and then you go after the FTC. It doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't pass the straight-face test."
"Why would you go after the FTC and make it harder for small businesses to survive in this landscape? You all talk about competition... and then you go after the FTC. It doesn't make any sense." pic.twitter.com/8EF8AOmW8m
— American Economic Liberties Project (@econliberties) April 30, 2025
Jordan ultimately relented and the House Judiciary Committee voted to remove the section in question, which would have transferred the FTC's antitrust staff and funding to the Justice Department—which doesn't have the same statutory authority to protect the American public from "unfair methods of competition."
Morgan Harper, director of policy and advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project, said in a statement that Jordan and other Republicans on the judiciary panel "did the right thing scrapping a proposal that would have kneecapped antitrust enforcement against our economy’s most harmful monopolies."
"We applaud Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee that stood up against his harmful proposal to ensure this amendment landed where it belongs—on the cutting room floor," said Harper.
But Jordan made clear following Wednesday's hearing that he did not agree to remove the FTC proposal from the reconciliation package out of genuine concern about its implications for the future of antitrust enforcement.
Rather, he accepted Republican senators' warnings that the proposal wouldn't comply with the rules of the budget reconciliation process.
"We'll just do it in a standalone bill," Jordan told Punchbowl.
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'This Will Gut the FTC': Republicans Push Musk-Backed Plan to Kill Key Antitrust Law
"Jim Jordan and House Judiciary Republicans are directly undermining both current and future litigation against the monopolies that gouge and censor Americans."
Apr 29, 2025
House Republicans are set to consider legislation on Wednesday that experts say would effectively eliminate a law that gives the Federal Trade Commission sole authority to protect the American public from corporations engaging in "unfair methods of competition."
The GOP-controlled House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), released the bill Monday as part of a sweeping, filibuster-proof reconciliation package that Republicans are looking to pass as soon as next month.
The new bill states that "all FTC antitrust actions, all FTC antitrust employees, all FTC antitrust assets, and all FTC antitrust funding" must be "transferred to the attorney general." The proposal is virtually identical to Republican legislation that Elon Musk, a lieutenant of President Donald Trump and the richest person in the world, endorsed earlier this year.
Matt Stoller, research director at the American Economic Liberties Project, observed Monday that the House Judiciary Committee measure is "not just a bill to change the office locations and reporting structures." Specifically, Stoller noted that the bill doesn't explicitly transfer to the Justice Department the FTC's authority under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act to combat "unfair methods of competition."
"That authority," Stoller wrote, "remains with an agency that has no staff and no capacity to litigate, which means it could die."
Alvaro Bedoya, who is currently engaged in a legal fight to get his job back at the FTC after Trump fired him and another Democratic commissioner last month, echoed Stoller's concerns, writing on social media that the Republican bill "doesn't transfer the laws that FTC enforces, or authority to enforce those laws."
"This will gut the FTC," Bedoya wrote, noting that the agency's legal action against pharmacy benefit managers—pharmaceutical industry middlemen—would likely be among the casualties of the Republican bill, given that "the sole law that the FTC alleges was broken in all three counts was that core prohibition against 'unfair methods of competition.'"
Stoller pointed out in his blog post that Section 5 is also used "in the antitrust case against Amazon" and "another case against Corteva/Syngenta over exclusive dealing in seeds and chemicals." It was also "the authority used to ban noncompete agreements," he wrote.
"These cases, as well as every consent decree ever reached under Section 5, are now at risk," Stoller added.
The House Judiciary Committee is slated to mark up the legislation on Wednesday afternoon, starting at 2:00 pm ET.
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, said in a statement Monday that the measure as a whole is "laden with language attempting to protect corporate wrongdoers."
"One provision appears to effectively eliminate the FTC pro-competition division," said Gilbert. "Another set of provisions makes significant changes to the already overreaching Congressional Review Act. One measure says that major rules that raise revenue go into effect only if Congress proactively approves them. Another section says for the next four years Congress has to affirmatively approve rules for them not to expire."
"If made law," she warned, "this would sign a death warrant for a slew of important consumer, worker, and environmental protections."
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