With President-elect Donald Trump’s recent nomination of Pam Bondi to serve as attorney general, and his naming of Gail Slater to head the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice, the groundwork has been laid to begin unshackling America’s marketplace, which has for decades been hampered by unnecessary regulations and — during the Biden Administration — subjected to out-and-out lawfare by the very Department of Justice supposed to protect the marketplace from anti-competitive forces.
The question now is, how quickly can these abusive, economic lawfare practices be struck from the Department’s agenda and an originalist interpretation of the nation’s antitrust laws restored?
The mission of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is to uphold federal law. The Department, however, cannot and has never carried out this mission in a vacuum. As a component of the executive branch of the federal government, it operates necessarily — and appropriately — according to the underlying policy preferences of the elected president.
It bears reminding that Democrats lost the presidential election in November. Whether the losers like it or not, President-elect Trump has every right to choose individuals to occupy top positions at the Justice Department who will respect and implement the policies that clearly and openly were at the foundation of his Nov. 5 electoral victory.
Moreover, Trump is fully empowered to populate the top echelons of the Department with men and women who – unlike his soon-to-be predecessor – actually respect the rule of law and who will not employ the powers of the Justice Department to undermine legal norms and the institutions our Founders so carefully crafted.
For example, in the Bizarro World of the Biden Administration, when a state government – the Commonwealth of Virginia – moved to protect the integrity of its voting processes by stopping illegal immigrants from voting, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Virginia to prevent it from taking such measures!