If there be any doubt remaining as to where Barack Hussein Obama intends to take the country, consider his nomination of Goodwin Liu to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The 40-year old University of California (at Berkeley) law professor needs to secure the 60 votes as early as today in the Senate, needed to overcome a promised filibuster by Republicans.
Besides having had no hands-on judicial experience, Liu’s writing’s and pronouncements show him to harbor views that would seem excessively liberal even by the liberal standards of the 9th Circuit.
The WSJ in its lead editorial today quotes Liu:
On Chief Justice John Roberts: “A Supreme Court nominee must be evaluated on more than just legal intellect.”
On Samuel Alito: “Judge Alito’s record envisions an America where police may shoot and kill an unarmed boy to stop him from running away with a stolen purse.”
More: “(Alito) approaches law in a formalistic, mechanical way abstracted from human experience.”
More: “(…judges should) determine, at the moment of decision, whether our collective values on a given issue have converged to a degree that they can be persuasively crystallized and credibly absorbed into legal doctrine.”
On the use of international law in the courtroom: “The resistance to this practice to this practice is difficult for me to grasp, since the U.S. can hardly claim to have a monopoly on wise solutions to common legal problems faced by constitutional democracies around the world.”
And: “’free enterprise’, ‘private ownership of property’ and ‘limited government’…are code words for an ideological agenda hostile to environmental, work place, and consumer protections.”
Republicans have been known to roll over for Democrat judicial appointments. Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan both were installed without much fuss. The thinking goes that American presidents should pretty much be afforded the right to pick whoever they want as court vacancies occur. If recent history is a guide, Obama can expect to get this nominee through the confirmation process as well after some initial, obligatory grumbling from the peanut gallery.
Recent developments have shown, however, that suspicion remains high that Obama’s agenda is damaging to the country overall. Nowhere is the impact of a presidency greater than in president’s prerogative to appoint wildly partisan judges for life. As more and more – especially Republican – lawmakers are waking up to the fact of what’s happening to our nation, future nominations can be expected to be hard fought – starting today.
This is not to say that people like Liu should not be allowed to express their views. Far from it; our Constitution (or what’s left of it) expressly allows for it. It’s just that we are not necessarily obliged to put such people in leadership positions.
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