ABC News: Supreme Court Battle Quietly Brews Over Possible Future Nominations
RELATED: Goodwin Liu: Obama’s Most Radical Judicial Nominee
(New information is emerging about President Barack Obama's federal appeals court nominee Goodwin Liu. If the Seante approves Liu's appointment to the 9th Circuit Court, Liu will be among the judges ruling on appeals of cases originating from Federal District Court in Honolulu.)
…In 2007, Liu joined 17 other professors and submitted a friend of the court brief to the California Supreme Court, arguing that California's definition of marriage between a man and a woman violated the state constitution. The issue is likely to come before the U.S. Supreme Court in some form over the next few years…. (This was buried at the end of the article, natch.)
"His nomination seems to me to represent the apex of judicial activist philosophy," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "His views represent a fundamental change in our understanding of the role in society of the court."
Although Liu has never argued a Supreme Court case, he has written extensively on constitutional law and civil rights. His scholarly work -- touching on everything including affirmative action, the death penalty, welfare rights and same-sex marriage -- provides his critics with an unusually long paper trail. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2000 and later told the Los Angeles Times that Bush v. Gore, the decision that settled the 2000 presidential election, was "utterly lacking in legal principle."….
Scalia worries that those who follow Liu's philosophy find constitutional “rights” that are not set forth in the Constitution.
M. Edward Whelan III, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has written extensively about Liu's record on his blog in the National Review online. Of Liu's book, Whelan writes, "What Liu means by 'keeping faith' is evidently adherence to the living-constitutionalist gimmick that judges can redefine the Constitution to mean whatever they want it to mean."
"Liu has all the makings of a hard-Left judicial activist," says Whelan, "as shown by his positions on matters ranging from welfare rights to racial quotas to same-sex marriage and by his utterly lawless constitutional philosophy generally."
Liu sits on the board of the liberal American Constitution Society, and opposed the nominations of both Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. In an op-ed, Liu wrote that the nomination of Roberts "is a seismic event that threatens to deepen the nation's red-blue divide."
In 2006, Liu testified against the nomination of Alito, saying the judge had an "exceptionally talented legal mind," but that he was concerned with "Alito's lack of skepticism toward government power that infringes on individual rights and liberties."
(If this clown is accepted by the Senate, Hawaii residents will have to make it all the way to the Supreme Court to find justice.)
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