A longtime Michigan law professor has created a stir by contributing to the controversial Project 2025 presidential transition plan after serving several roles in the administration of former President Donald Trump, outlining a new vision for enforcing antitrust and consumer protection laws.
Adam Candeub is an Ivy League-educated senior fellow with the conservative Center of Renewing America and Michigan State University law professor who wrote the last chapter of the 922-page Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation initiative that has prompted criticism from Democrats for some of its proposals and concern among some at the university because of the professor’s connection to it. But outside experts called Candeub’s ideas for the Federal Trade Commission a “bold vision,” though they’re unlikely to become a reality.
A collaboration of 400 scholars and policy experts from across the country, Project 2025 is a 180-day playbook for Trump and a Republican administration if he is elected in November and builds on similar treatises published by the foundation since 1980.
Also known as Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise, proposals that have stirred controversy include creating a larger, more powerful border policing agency, cutting government spending, moving education funding and decisions to the states and banning transgender women from competing in women’s sports. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has called Project 2025 a plan to “strip away our freedoms.” Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has disavowed the plan and called some proposals “ridiculous,” even though former Trump officials contributed to it.
Candeub, who served a brief stint as a deputy associate attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice, wrote the final chapter on the Federal Trade Commission, arguing for a broader view of antitrust policy than focusing on consumer welfare, contending it should protect democratic values such as free speech, the marketplace of ideas, shareholder control and managerial accountability.
Candeub says he has been sent “threatening emails from strangers” regarding his work but declined to comment further.
Candueb’s conservative work is getting attention at MSU because it bucks the notion of a “strong correlation between education and leaning left,” said Casey O’Donnell, an MSU associate professor in the Department of Media and Information.
“Clearly, this is something the professor has done research on, and what faculty members do on their own time, it’s as protected as (anyone else’s),” O’Donnell said. “We are free to say what we want, but we are not free from the consequences. What we say is not disconnected from what people think of us.”
When asked about Candeub’s contribution to Project 2025, MSU officials said the university embraces academic freedom.
“It gives faculty members the freedom to address their academic subjects, challenge conventional wisdom, and publish controversial research papers,” MSU spokesperson Mark Bullion said. “Adam Candeub does not speak for MSU. And he has not violated any university policies by being involved with Project 2025. “
What law professor envisions
Project 2025 “is the conservative movement’s unified effort to be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025,” wrote Paul Dans, Project 2025 director, in the beginning of the document. It is supported by a broad coalition of conservative organizations, such as the Coalition for a Prosperous America, Family Research Council, Honest Elections Project and Hillsdale College in southern Michigan.
“The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before,” Dans wrote. “The task at hand to reverse this tide and restoreour Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement. With the quickening approach of January 2025, we have two years and one chance to get it right.”
Project 2025’s 30 chapters include 34 authors. Candeub is the only one from Michigan besides Ben Carson, the Detroit native and former secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under Trump. Other individuals contributed support for the overall document, including Michael Anton, a lecturer in politics and research fellow at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center in Washington, D.C., and Jason Hayes, director of energy and environmental policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland.
In his section on the FTC, Candeub wants more vigorous enforcement against Big Tech companies and a discontinuation of allowing corporations to use ESG (environmental, social, and governance) initiatives as a cover for what he argues is anti-competitive behavior. Under President Joe Biden’s FTC, firms try “to get out of antitrust liability by offering climate, diversity, or other forms of ESG-type offerings,” wrote Candeub, who is director of MSU’s Intellectual Property, Information, and Communications Law Program.
“Antitrust law can combat dominant firms’ baleful effects on democratic” notions — “such as free speech, the marketplace of ideas, shareholder control, and managerial accountability as well as collusive behavior with government,” said the professor, who also was a deputy assistant secretary of commerce and acting assistant secretary for National Telecommunications and Information Administration in the Trump administration.
Candeub wrote that state attorneys general “are far more responsive to their constituents” than the federal government generally is, and he recommends that the FTC create a position in the chairman’s office that is “focused on state AG cooperation and inviting state AGs to Washington, DC, to discuss enforcement policy in key sectors under the FTC’s jurisdiction: Big Tech, hospital mergers, supermarket mergers, and so forth.”
FTC officials declined to comment on Candeub’s comments about the commission.
On Monday at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow of Royal Oak warned convention attendees and a national television audience of an unprecedented “expansion of presidential powers” should Trump regain the White House and adopt the blueprint’s ideas.
“They’re talking about replacing the whole federal government with an army of loyalists who answer only to Donald Trump,” said McMorrow, adding that the former president could use the FBI as his personal police force.
Many MSU students have been talking about Project 2025 and the chapter that Candeub wrote with the upcoming election, said Ryan Rosenblatt, president of ACLU MSU, a student group that raises awareness on civil liberties issues. Law students have been discussing people’s rights and civil liberties, with some supporting Project 2025 while others feel the opposite, he said.
“I think it’s really awesome we have professors who are engaging in politics in the real world,” said Rosenblatt, a third-year student. “Being able to have difference of thoughts is really what makes the United States so special. There are a lot of different countries where differences of opinion from the government or from each other can harm somebody in terms of what their rights are, whether they can survive and thrive in the community. In the U.S., it’s so amazing that we can have disagreements and still be civil about it and find a way to come to a common ground. That’s what being an American is all about.”
Tristyn Meyer, a second-year MSU law student from central California, has taken a class with Candeub and became aware of the professor’s conservative background but thinks it’s best to respect people’s political opinions.
“Though there is a lot in Project 20205 that goes completely against what I think America should be, it’s not going to stop me from taking classes from (Candueb),” said Meyer, vice president of the Elliot Spoon Business and Securities Law Institute. “He has every right to do whatever he wants. Even though I fundamentally disagree with the Heritage Foundation and fundamentally disagree with the cult of personality of Donald Trump, in our current political climate, I think ostracizing people is the wrong move and is only going to make things worse.”
What experts think
Erik Gordon, a clinical professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, called Candeub’s chapter “a bold vision that changes the meaning and goals of antitrust regulation.”
“The ideas might or might not be good,” Gordon said, “but other than more vigorous enforcement of existing antitrust law, they have little chance of escaping the think tank and being adopted.”
Mark Jamison, a nonresident senior fellow with the center-right American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C., added that Candeub “had a difficult task given the diversity of views in the Republican Party.”
“Perhaps because of this, he chose to speak well of most of the alternative views and offer few prescriptions,” Jamison said. “I would have preferred that he had clearly defended rule of law and sound economic reasoning, which have been hallmarks of the party in recent years. If the party continues to drift towards populism in its economic policies, the businesses that succeed will be those that learn to please government officials. Customers and the economy will suffer.”
Candeub wants to pay less attention to how market power affects consumers and “more attention to hot-button issues,” he said.
“To do otherwise would be to ‘unilaterally disarm,’ in his words, because the Democrats are already using the Federal Trade Commission to pursue DEI, ESG, and other agendas,” Jamison said. “The passion is easy to feel, but the reasoning is hard to justify. Like Biden’s antitrust team, he argues that the current laws are not sufficiently prescriptive to justify focusing on consumer impacts — what is called the consumer welfare standard. But the statutes emphasize fairness in competition and dictionaries of that time indicate that this meant protection of free market principles. … This puts customer interests front and center for antitrust.”
Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=66c95504ac394b8898bf5217170531fb&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.detroitnews.com%2Fstory%2Fnews%2Fpolitics%2F2024%2F08%2F23%2Fmichigan-professor-adam-candeub-chapter-project-2025-creates-stir-experts-weigh-ideas-ftc%2F74726757007%2F&c=9779594351292549792&mkt=en-us
Author :
Publish date : 2024-08-23 16:01:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
