Last week, President Obama nominated Goodwin Liu to a seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and immediately Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center started attacked Liu through a series of Bench Memos posts, accusing him of engaging in “demagogic testimony against Justice Alito’s confirmation” and adhering “the living-constitutionalist gimmick that judges can redefine the Constitution to mean whatever they want it to mean.”
That was followed by a post claiming that the American Bar Association’s rating of Liu as “well qualified” was “a joke” before Whelan got around to critiquing things like Liu’s law-review articles and his views on issues like marriage equality and the death penalty.
Given the Liu was just nominated last week, the “Stop Liu” effort hasn’t really had a chance to get underway, but you can rest assured that once it does, it will be relying heavily on Whelan’s work in laying out the case for opposing his nomination, as you can see by this post by Bruce Hausknecht on Focus on the Family’s blog which consists almost entirely of links to Whelan’s Bench Memos posts:
Prof. Liu would be a perfect fit for the 9th Circuit
That is, if you’d like to continue the 9th Circuit’s reputation as the most bizarro, most liberal, most reversed appeals court in the federal system.
Liu, a Berkeley law professor, was nominated by President Obama for a vacant seat on the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals headquartered in San Francisco. An under-qualified but outspoken liberal, he has managed in his short few years out of law school to burnish and publicize his liberal credentials.
He’s a former board member for an exclusive list of far Left organizations: the ACLU of California, the American Constitution Society of Northern California, and the National Women’s Law Center. He managed to get himself invited to Justice Alito’s confirmation hearings to mischaracterize and then demagogue to the Judiciary committee about Alito’s record.
Liu wrote an op-ed criticizing California’s Prop 8 marriage amendment and the seven million citizens who voted for it by labeling it as “the will of a narrow and ultimately temporary majority.”
And last but certainly not least, Liu firmly has stated his belief in the desirability of courts making law from the bench: “What we mean by [constitutional] fidelity is that the Constitution should be interpreted in ways that adapt its principles and its text to the challenges and conditions of our society in every succeeding generation.”
This guy’s confirmation hearings should be interesting.
h/t to Ed Whelan at Bench Memos
