Vote Today in US Senate On Obama's Radical Judicial Nominee

Update 1:30 pm - Goodwin Liu Nomination FAILS 52-43. Republican Sen. Hatch (UT) voting Present. Three Republicans and one Democrat Senators did not vote {have not determined if they were out of town or just skipped the vote). No Democrats voted No. RINO Republican Sen. Murkowski (AK) votes no.
Yesterday, the Senate voted 42-57 against the motion to proceed to S. 953, the Republican bill to increase domestic energy production. The motion needed 60 votes for approval.

The Senate has resumed consideration of the nomination of Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. And at 2 PM, the Senate will vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the Liu nomination. It is critical for Republicans to stop this nomination. If cloture is invoked, the Senate democrats will move quickly to vote on this nominee who has openly attacked Conservative judges. Fox News noted earlier this week, “Liu has been the most controversial of President Obama’s judicial selections, aside from his picks for the Supreme Court.”

And The Wall Street Journal reports today, “More than either of President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees, Mr. Liu has emerged as the flashpoint of ideological warfare over the federal bench. Democrats describe Mr. Liu, a Rhodes Scholar and former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as a brilliant legal mind with a particular expertise in education law. Republicans offer the opposite image, portraying Mr. Liu as a threat to ‘the American tradition of neutral judges and limited, constitutional government,’ as Sens. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) and Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) said in a press release. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) ‘strongly opposes the nomination and will have more to say in a speech on the floor’ Thursday, his spokesman said.”

In a must-read editorial, the WSJ explains why Liu is such a troubling nominee. “Before his own nomination to the bench, Professor Liu led the opposition to Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Of the now-Chief Justice, Mr. Liu wrote that regardless of Mr. Roberts’s qualifications, ‘a Supreme Court nominee must be evaluated on more than legal intellect.’ On Mr. Alito, he was nastier: ‘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,’ Mr. Liu said in written testimony. Charming stuff. . . . Professor Liu blasted Justice Alito because ‘[h]e approaches law in a formalistic, mechanical way abstracted from human experience.’ Such stodgy fealty to the law isn’t Mr. Liu’s idea of good judging. In a 2008 Stanford Law Review article, Mr. Liu wrote that 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.’ That broad legal discretion has led the professor to find a constitutional right to welfare and gay marriage, and to read the 14th Amendment as providing a right to health insurance and child care. On using international law as a precedent in U.S. courts, Mr. Liu has said ‘The resistance to this practice is difficult for me to grasp, since the United States can hardly claim to have a monopoly on wise solutions to common legal problems faced by constitutional democracies around the world.’”

As The Journal editorial notes, “We dislike judicial filibusters, but Democrats can hardly protest because Republicans are imitating the practice they pioneered when George W. Bush was President.” Indeed, The Washington Post writes today, “[Ranking Judiciary Committee Republican Chuck] Grassley blamed Senate Democrats for their filibusters early last decade, which came after Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) led an effort to consider more than just legal qualifications and instead also probe a nominee’s legal and political ideology. ‘Both political parties are going by the Schumer standard now,’ Grassley said.”

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), a member of the Judiciary Committee, summarized the reasons to oppose Goodwin Liu’s nomination in a speech on the floor. “It is . . . about a concern or rising out of a systemic, broad-based interpretive approach, one that I believe doesn’t give due regard to the rule of law, to the notion that we are a nation that lives under the law, that our laws consist of words, that words have defined finite meaning, and that in order for our laws to work properly, that meaning needs to be respected and it needs to be interpreted in and of itself and held as an independent good by the judiciary on a consistent basis. Professor Liu’s appalling treatment of Justice Alito leaves great doubt in my mind as to whether he possesses the requisite judgment to serve as a life-tenured judge, and I have come to the conclusion that Professor Liu’s extreme judicial philosophy is simply incompatible with the proper role of a judge in our constitutional republic. For these reasons, as well as those articulated by many of my colleagues, I’m compelled to oppose this nomination.”

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