The confirmation hearing for RFK Jr. is more than a little surreal because it presents the spectacle of a left-wing activist being proposed by a Republican president, defended by Republican senators, and attacked by Democratic senators. That scrambles some of the usual narratives. One of the most hilarious moments involved Elizabeth Warren attacking RFK Jr. for being in bed with the plaintiffs’ personal injury bar and profiting from the falsehoods he spreads in aid of their lawsuits against pharmaceutical and other medical companies:

She’s not wrong. But consider the irony of Elizabeth Warren making this argument about the power of a regulatory agency to put a thumb on the scales in favor of people trying to cash in on lawsuits against the industries that the agency regulates:

Let’s do a quick count of how, as Secretary of HHS, if you get confirmed, you can influence every one of those lawsuits. Let me start the list. You can publish your anti-vaccine conspiracies, but this time on U.S. government letterhead, something that a jury may be impressed by. You can appoint people to the CDC vaccine panel who share your anti-vax views and let them do your dirty work. You can tell the CDC vaccine panel to remove a particular vaccine from the vaccine schedule. You can remove vaccines from special compensation programs, which would open up manufacturers to mass torts. You can make more injuries eligible for compensation even if there is no causal evidence. You can change vaccine court processes to make it easier to bring junk lawsuits. You could turn over FDA data to your friends at the law firm and they can use it however it benefited them. You could change vaccine labeling. You could change vaccine information rules. You can change which claims are compensated in the vaccine-injury program. There are a lot of ways that you can influence those future lawsuits and pending lawsuits while you are secretary of HHS.

Gee, it sure sounds as if this position gives one man too much unilateral power over a crucial sector of our economy, doesn’t it? It sounds as if maybe Congress should reconsider all those “the Secretary may” and “the Secretary shall” designations. Of course, this is exactly how Warren normally wants agencies to operate. It’s how she wrote the powers of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when she was aiming to head the CFPB.

A corrupt racket in which Washington bureaucrats collude with friends and political allies in the plaintiffs’ bar to blacken the reputations and weaken the legal defenses of regulated industries? That’s how the administrative state is designed to work. And Warren will immediately go back to wanting it to work that way after today. But, for one morning, it just so happens that there’s a nominee who is perceived as being marginally more hostile in a few specific ways to one industry than the Democrats are, so, suddenly, that’s a scandal.