The Senate has blocked the nomination of left-wing law professor Goodwin Liu to sit on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over the western fifth of the United States. By a 52-to-43 vote, the Senate failed to override a Republican filibuster. All Republicans except Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted against Liu. All Democrats except Ben Nelson voted for Liu.
Liu, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has virtually no experience in the courtroom, and has argued that “‘free enterprise, private ownership of property, and limited government” are right-wing ideological “code words.”
Liu is a big supporter of race-based busing, arguing it should be required not merely within school districts, but across school district lines to create what are effectively region-wide racial quotas, a radical claim rejected by the Supreme Court long ago (the Supreme Court rejects busing across district lines even in desegregation cases).
(Disclosure: I filed an amicus brief in the Seattle Schools case against race-based school assignments within a school system; the racial percentages in that case were struck down by the Supreme Court in a 5-to-4 vote after being upheld by the Ninth Circuit, to which Liu was nominated).
The slippery Liu now claims to oppose racial quotas, but he supports mandating fixed racial percentages and ratios, which is exactly what racial quotas are, under a dictionary definition of “quota.”
(Racial quotas in the schools are sometimes implemented at the urging of left-wing academics who harbor divisive and offensive racial stereotypes, such as “diversity” consultants who claim that whites are coldly “impersonal” and “intellectual” and thus need to be racially balanced with minorities who are “emotional” and “personal.”)
Liu is also a big user of politically-correct psychobabble designed to hide judicial activism, writing that a judge is supposed to be a “culturally situated interpreter of social meaning” rather than an impartial umpire who interprets the law in accord with its plain meaning or its framers’ intent.
The National Review‘s Ed Whelan describes some of Liu’s many radical positions here. (Whelan is a former high-ranking Justice Department lawyer).
