Our Morally Bankrupt Legal Elite

That Neal Katyal can have a big profile op-ed about the awfulness of Bill Barr just a couple of days after arguing in front of the Supreme Court in favor of full corporate immunity from any responsibility for the global child slave labor regime making their products is a perfect window into the moral sewer that is the nation’s legal elite. This is a particularly egregious example that impacts my own personal policy preferences. But it’s in the same class as liberal legal elites engaging in a race to write the most fawning op-ed for whatever extremist conservative gets nominated to the Supreme Court each and every time it happens. And of course Katyal himself is one of the guilty parties in that grotesquery as well, as he testified in favor of Neil Gorsuch during the latter’s confirmation hearing.

To say the least, Katyal has no obligation to defend the child slave labor system. He can do that if he wants to. But there is absolutely, positively no reason to not criticize him for it and moreover, there should be no room for him in any kind of liberal politics, very much including in the Biden administration. Everyone has the right to legal counsel, but Nestle’s ability to use forced labor of 7 year olds is not some impoverished guy on trial for murder. Katyal made his choice. He should have to pay the consequences for that. And those consequences should be him being drummed out of the inner circle of liberal elite law and all the perks that comes with it.

If anything, the Times should be running op-eds about Katyal’s own moral turpitude, not publishing one by the hypocrite against the moral turpitude of another, also awful, legal elite.