Makan Delrahim, President Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, was about as uncontroversial as nominees come for this administration (and that’s saying something). His confirmation hearing in May was so uneventful, the Senate Judiciary Committee bundled it with two other DOJ nominees; just three senators asked Delrahim questions. Delrahim then sailed to the Senate floor in a 19-1 vote in June, with only Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, voting against him. On nominations like this, rank-and-file senators usually follow the lead of committees of jurisdiction.

But much has changed in the three months since Delrahim’s confirmation was sent to the full Senate, where it remains today. The fight against monopolies has shifted from a lonely crusade on the left to a major plank within the Democratic Party, whose latest attempt at rebranding, A Better Deal, features a promise to fight corporate consolidation. Thus, Delrahim’s previously uncontroversial confirmation has now become a major test of whether Democrats will live up to their promises.

Delrahim, currently a deputy counsel to the president, fits squarely in the bipartisan mainstream of antitrust policy as it’s been practiced over the past four decades. He was chief counsel to Senator Orrin Hatch, who despite being a partisan Republican has an interesting past on antitrust policy, including skepticism of Microsoft in the 1990s and Google as recently as last year. Republicans and many Democrats support his nomination. Allen Grunes, a former Justice Department official supportive of more aggressive antitrust policy, calls Delrahim “practical” and “creative” and says he would be a good enforcer.

Delrahim would be entering his second month on the job were it not for one senator. When Senate Republicans attempted to include Delrahim in a mass of nominees confirmed by voice vote before the August recess, Elizabeth Warren blocked the maneuver, seeking a larger debate around the nominee—and antitrust policy. “When companies can consume their rival companies instead of competing with them, consumers can get stuck with few or no alternatives—so prices go up, and quality suffers,” the Massachusetts senator had written on Facebook in April, saying that Delrahim represented “the latest edition of the fox guarding the henhouse” and showed how Trump will “put the interests of giant corporations ahead of the American people.”

Both Grunes’s and Warren’s perspectives have elements of truth. Delrahim is a mainstream antitrust figure. Within that narrow range, he might even be decent on enforcement. But it’s also the case that he’s rotated between government service and lobbying on behalf of large corporations.