Goodwin H Liu: Another Radical Obama Nominee

Well, it certainly makes sense that Obama would nominate radicals to the US Circuit Court of Appeals. He can’t “fundamentally transform America” on his own.

The Washington Times: In the case of Goodwin H. Liu, nominated on Feb. 24 for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the substance behind the words is even worse than the verbiage.Mr. Liu is an assistant dean at the University of California Berkeley law school who once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so he probably boasts some intellectual firepower. Yet it’s the sort of firepower that fits better within the walls of academe, marked by its uniquely indecipherable mumbo-jumbo, than on a bench where clarity is essential.

Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center dug up an example of Mr. Liu’s written reason so outlandish as to be unacceptable on its face, no matter what the substance of the legal theory being promoted. In a 2008 Stanford Law Review article, Mr. Liu wrote that judges should engage in “socially situated modes of reasoning that appeal … to the culturally and historically contingent meanings of particular social goods in our own society” and to “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.”

In other words, Liu believes judges shouldn’t be bound by the Constitution, but rather a “systematic moral theory,” and he “envisions the judiciary … as a culturally situated interpreter of social meaning.” He thinks judges should read between the lines of the Constitution and apply their wisdom to interpret some deeper meaning. But it gets even worse.

As repeated many times in his essay, Mr. Liu’s goal was to create a judicially enforceable, constitutional right to welfare. He hastened to add that such a revolution would only be pushed in an “evolutionary” way – not immediately – by “cue[ing] the policymaking process toward greater deliberation and rationality.”

This agenda is dangerous. Judges have less business cueing up policy than referees would have to suggest what plays a quarterback should call.

In addition, Liu doesn’t even meet the standards outlined by the American Bar Association for federal judges.

These standards include “at least 12 years’ experience in the practice of law” and “substantial courtroom and trial experience.” Mr. Whelan points out that Mr. Liu, who is only 39 years old, “hasn’t even been out of law school for 12 years” and has “zero ‘experience as a trial lawyer.’”

Are there any Republicans with enough spine to do something about this?