President-elect Joe Biden should nominate Neal Katyal for U.S. attorney general—not because he's the most qualified candidate, but because of the dangerous precedent failing to nominate him would set.
Katyal is a #Resistance hero who, among other things, led the legal challenge to President Trump's controversial travel ban and was an outspoken critic of Trump's decision to continue the Obama-era policy of separating migrant children from their families at the southern border. He previously served as acting solicitor general under President Obama and represented al Qaeda terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
More recently, Katyal appeared before the Supreme Court to defend his corporate clients—Nestlé and Cargill—against accusations that they had abetted child slavery and torture. Slate reports that in the course of defending his clients, Katyal sided with the Trump administration and went even further by proposing "an extreme theory that would shield all corporations from lawsuits under a crucial federal law."
When it comes to defending corporate clients, which are accused of knowingly profiting from human rights abuses at cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast, Katyal isn't afraid to go bold. For example, he went so far as to invoke the Holocaust, arguing that because the company that supplied the Zyklon B used in Nazi gas chambers was not indicted at Nuremberg, his corporate clients shouldn't be held liable for abetting the enslavement and torture of children.
It takes someone historic like @neal_katyal to stand in the shoes of the company that manufactured Zyklon B, this is why representation matters pic.twitter.com/hRMA1rvl9M
— David Dayen (@ddayen) December 1, 2020
Naturally, some radical liberals are outraged. That's precisely why Katyal should be the next attorney general. At the very least, he deserves a high-ranking role in the Biden administration. What are the libs going to do, cry more?
Biden has already followed in Obama's footsteps by hiring a bunch of former lobbyists for controversial companies such as Eli Lilly, Facebook, and Fannie Mae. His nominee for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, cofounded a secretive consulting firm that boasted of helping American universities court investment from China. Neera Tanden, the president-elect's nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, is president of a liberal advocacy group funded by corporations such as Amazon, Facebook, and Bank of America.
How, exactly, are benevolent Democrats supposed to make money if not by advancing the interests of the corporations they routinely denigrate as greedy and corrupt? Obama's former advisers knew the drill, which is why after leaving the White House they ended up working for companies such as McDonald's, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Mastercard, and Uber, among others. TikTok recently poached senior advisers to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.) to spearhead the Chinese-owned firm's lobbying efforts.
Corporate lawyers and lobbyists are the backbone of the Democratic Party elite. They have the most money because they have the richest clients and aren't dumb enough to actually live their lives according to the political values they espouse in public. If aggrieved libs succeed in making the case that representing problematic corporations is bad, it would effectively rule out almost every Democrat qualified to serve in the executive branch.
America is a democracy. Corporations are people. They deserve a voice in Washington, even the ones that profit from child slavery. Neal Katyal knows this and isn't afraid to earn large sums of money protecting this fundamental right. He is the attorney general America deserves.