One thing must be said of President Obama — he gives good value in return for the hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions he got from the nation’s labor movement. Unions spent an estimated $200 million electing Obama and re-electing Democratic majorities in Congress in 2008. Union officials ought to be ecstatic with Obama’s performance since then because he has delivered everything he promised the unions, and more. Obama’s largesse is all the more amazing when it is remembered that unions represent fewer than 7 percent of all private-sector workers. Fortunately for the country, Democrats in Congress don’t always share Obama’s blind fealty to the union label. Consider yesterday’s cloture vote in the Senate on Obama’s nomination of 40-year-old Berkeley Law School professor Goodwin Liu to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Liu is among the most radical leftists ever nominated for a federal court, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hoped to cut off Republican opposition to the nomination by calling the cloture vote. But Reid failed when the motion for cloture received only 52 votes of the 60 needed. Had the motion for cloture carried, Liu’s nomination would have been cleared for a final floor vote, although it was far from certain that Liu would have been confirmed.

What is certain is that Obama nominated a man whose views bring to mind the fiery socialist diatribes delivered by United Auto Workers hero Walter Reuther in 1937 when he returned from a couple of years working in a proletarian communal factory in Gorky, an industrial city in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Speaking in 2006 against President George W. Bush’s nomination of John Roberts for chief justice, Liu dismissed “free enterprise,” “private ownership of property” and “limited government” as nothing more than “code words for an ideological agenda hostile to environmental, workplace and consumer protections.” And speaking of ideological agendas, Liu has made clear that he sees in Obama’s election “the opportunity to actually get our ideas and the progressive vision of the Constitution and of law and policy into practice.”