Conservatives Urge Congress to Confirm Mark Meador for FTC

Conservative leaders on Monday wrote to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-TX), urging Congress to confirm Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner nominee Mark Meador, who will be a strong advocate for “strong, yet targeted” antitrust and consumer protection enforcement.

The conservative coalition contended that President Donald Trump’s landslide election gave him a “clear mission,” which is to “take our country back from the elites, liberal mobs, and deep state directing our country towards certain disaster.”

The conservatives wrote that confirming Meador, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who served as Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) deputy chief counsel for antitrust and competition policy, is essential to realizing Trump’s goal of removing the malign influence of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as well as environment, social, and governance (ESG) corporate policies from unduly influencing America’s children.

Read letter here:

Meador Conservative Letter by jmanship on Scribd

They noted Cruz “rightly said” that “every parent with a young child or a teenager either worries about, or knows first-hand, the real harms and dangers of addicted and anxiety-inducing social media.”

The coalition noted other issues the FTC urgently needs to address, including:

• Large pharmaceutical companies leveraging “deceptive advertising” to push “harmful puberty blockers on children”
• BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, three of the largest asset managers, for conspiring to “artificially constrict the coal market,” which raises energy prices
• TikTok “deceptively marketing its app as safe for minors,” even though it shows explicit material to children

“If we want to make any headway on any of these important issues, we need a strong FTC; these AGs [attorneys general] cannot do it alone,” the conservatives contended.

The leaders include:

• Aiden Buzzetti, the president of The Bull Moose Project
• Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project
• Julius Krein, editor of the Journal of American Affairs
• Josh Hammer, senior counsel for the Article III Project
• Oren Cass, the founder and chief economist for the American Compass
• Nathan Leamer, the executive director of the Digital First Project
• Clare Morell, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center
• Ryan Williams, the president of the Claremont Institute
• Rachel Bovard, the vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute
• Ryan Walker, the executive vice president of Heritage Action for America
• Nick Solheim, the CEO of American Moment

They continued:

Mr. Meador has been a long-time advocate for strong, yet targeted antitrust and consumer protection enforcement. He is a well-regarded and influential antitrust scholar. He also has the resume to back it up spanning across both antitrust agencies and as a staffer on Capitol Hill. President Trump could have not chosen a better champion to assist in him ushering in America’s golden age.

“Thus, we respectfully request that the Senate Commerce Committee expedite Mr. Meador’s confirmation, so that we can get back on track,” the conservatives wrote to Cruz and the Commerce Committee.