And, notably, it's an election year and the Biden administration wants everyone to see what's at stake in the election.
Yes, they probably also believe in what they're doing and yes, they've been putting this together for a while, but it's not a coincidence that we've had a regular cadence of these announcements for the past few months.
Edit: Recognizing when your party is playing a political game is a healthy part of the democratic process even if you agree with their goals. Pretending your preferred party is above political showmanship isn't even party loyalty, it's just naivete. Everyone needs to put on the show to accomplish their goals.
There's been a "regular cadence of these announcements" for the past 4 years. Should they just pause all enforcement actions when it's X number of months from an election? Shouldn't the politicians be actively earning our vote by doing things like this?
I'm not implying anything is broken about the process, but they're clearly timing their actions around the election. As just one example: out of the 36 Antitrust press releases from the Attorney General's office (the tags on this press release) [0], 13 (36%) were in 2024 and 7 (19%) were just in the months of August and September of this year. A regular cadence of 36 Antitrust announcements since the administration started would be <1 per month, so 3.5/mo over the past two months (one of which isn't even over) is a clear outlier. There's some allowance to be made for the time it takes to put a lawsuit together but not enough to account for that large a difference.
Again, that's not to imply anything about the ethics or motives of the people involved, nor to say they were sitting on their hands until now. All I'm saying is it's a reality of our political system that sometimes the answer to "why now?" is "because we saved it up for the election".
What does Lina Khan have to do with this DOJ case? That they're both doing similar stuff?
I'm not sure why people get so offended at the idea that political appointees on their side time their actions around election cycles. It's easy to believe about the $other party (for whatever value of $other), but for some reason we're very hesitant to acknowledge that our own people play the same game by the same rules.
Acknowledging that doesn't imply anything about the policy or about the motives of the actors, it's simply an acknowledgement that they're good at their jobs and know how to time things. But I guess it must feel slimy and we like to believe our guys are above that sort of thing?
Yes, they probably also believe in what they're doing and yes, they've been putting this together for a while, but it's not a coincidence that we've had a regular cadence of these announcements for the past few months.
Edit: Recognizing when your party is playing a political game is a healthy part of the democratic process even if you agree with their goals. Pretending your preferred party is above political showmanship isn't even party loyalty, it's just naivete. Everyone needs to put on the show to accomplish their goals.