The news was as straightforward as it was inevitable, so the Associated Press account of it might as well have been commentary:
The daughter of Yale Law School professor and “tiger mom” Amy Chua, who praised Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a mentor to women after his nomination to the Supreme Court, is going to work for Kavanaugh this summer.
Anyone who cared to pay attention had seen it coming, from the moment in Amy Chua’s disingenuous Wall Street Journal op-ed when she disingenuously claimed that Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court meant that her own daughter Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, scheduled to have been his appellate clerk, would “probably be looking for a different clerkship.” Again, the AP neatly laid out how it all went:
Chua faced criticism that her essay was self-serving and that her daughter was virtually guaranteed a Supreme Court job with Kavanaugh. Chua-Rubenfeld responded on Twitter last year that she wouldn’t be applying for a Supreme Court clerkship “anytime soon” because she had to fulfill her military service obligation after attending college on an ROTC scholarship.
These events were not even one full year ago. In retrospect, the only surprising thing was that Chua-Rubenfeld had felt any need to make up a phony story about how she was not really going to collect the quo for which her mother had openly gone quidding. But that had been before the full Kavanaugh story developed—the blackout drinking, the smug teen sexism, the sexual assault accusations, the screaming and lying at the Senators who had the temerity to ask him about it all—and so before the ruling class had concluded that his nomination was a test of whether or not they should ever be held accountable for anything, and that Kavanaugh’s legitimacy was their own legitimacy. Back then, 11 months ago, it was still possible to believe they owed the public a certain performance of shame and discretion.
Now they just grab what they want. Legitimacy is impunity. Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld doesn’t owe the public anything, as she takes her next step toward her long-planned goal of being a federal judge.
Who would even be accountable for any of this? It is a seamless garment of corruption, woven out of a little contribution from everyone. Yale Law doesn’t bar the children of Yale Law professors from going to Yale Law, or from getting clerkships through the program their parents supervise. The Wall Street Journal doesn’t block people from writing op-eds just because their personal interests are obviously at stake. The Supreme Court doesn’t tell its justices whom they may or may not hire as clerks. This is simply how it all works.
