[Article first appeared at Red County.]

The Senate Judiciary Committee nomination hearing for President Barack Obama’s Ninth Circuit Court nominee, Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu, is currently scheduled for Friday, April 16 at 10 a.m. Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has assured members that the hearing will proceed as planned, despite a request by Republican members asking for additional time to review Liu’s latest revision to his initial nomination questionnaire. The supplement given over to the Committee on April 5, added 117 events and items not previously disclosed, some of which contain controversial statements made by Liu in support of welfare rights, affirmative action, and correcting social inequalities from the bench.

Since the Obama administration tapped Liu to fill the open seat on the outlier appellate court, the choice has been controversial. Even before diving into his views on the role of the judiciary, Liu’s applied work with constitutional law is simply non-existent. Proceeding further than the basic elements of his biography and resume has been a process made more difficult by the nominee’s failure to provide complete records of his writings, appearances, and other notable events relating to his work as an attorney or legal scholar.

The ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), issued a tersely-worded statement last week affirming that Republican members would continue to press on Sen. Leahy for time to ingest the stack of new material citing his impressions from a quick skim of the contents as sufficient cause. Sen. Leahy offered an equally brusque rebuke, asserting that there would be no postponement in essence rewarding either ineptness or cleverness by Liu while also punishing the American public by reducing the transparency of the confirmation process.

Sen. Sessions wrote that Liu’s omissions were "particularly severe because many of them shed greater light on Liu’s most controversial and troubling views—such as his support for racial quotas and his belief that government welfare is a constitutional right."

Within the totality of the materials Liu has provided, Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans have found that the nominee has expressed views to support the right of citizens to receive welfare and government assistance, arguing for an even broader interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment than has been established in current case law. The documents also reveal the reiteration of positive and negative liberties that became a stumbling point for President Obama during the presidential campaign.

“[C]ontrary to the conventional wisdom that ‘the Constitution is a charter of negative rather than positive liberties,’ the social citizenship tradition assigns equal constitutional status to negative rights against government oppression and positive rights to government assistance on the ground that both are essential to liberty.”

Republicans have also caught Liu offering a rationale for using foreign law as a basis for interpreting the Constitution. In Liu’s words:

“[T]he use of foreign authority in American constitutional law is a judicial practice that has been very controversial in recent years. The U.S. Supreme Court has cited foreign authority in cases limiting the death penalty and invalidating criminal laws against homosexual sodomy, among others. The resistance to this practice is difficult for me to grasp, since the United States can hardly claim to have a monopoly on wise solutions to common legal problems faced by constitutional democracies around the world.”

Ed Whelan of the National Review online’s Bench Memos blog has written meticulously about the substance in the ever-increasing stack of paper on Liu. Whelan’s perspective as a former Department of Justice staffer and Harvard Law grad to deconstructing the extremely liberal judicial philosophy espoused by Liu, has made him the favorite target of two sycophantic websites spawned to combat his serious and substantive discussion of Liu’s unsuitability for a seat on the Ninth Circuit Court.

The response from Liu’s supporters has been weak and sycophantic. In the guise of fact checking, the Support Goodwin Liu and Confirm Goodwin Liu blogs have resorted to throwing sand in the face of Whelan’s legitimate criticism and analysis of Liu’s extreme comments pertaining to case law and constitutional theory. Both blogs borrow heavily from each other, squelch direct rebuttal of their ineffective campaign to debunk Whelan by having a no comment policy, and most recently use the nifty trick of enlisting among Liu’s supporters people who have not actually endorsed the nominee.

Former Republican congressman and Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr was featured in a post at SupportGoodwinLiu.com under the bold headline "Barr on Board." The post featured an excerpt from a Barr’s blog at the Atlanta Journal Constitution online where he called for a more reasonable analysis of a piece Liu wrote about the death penalty. Although Support Goodwin Liu clearly meant to imply that Barr had jumped into the pool to back Liu, Barr affirmed by email that he is not taking any position on the Liu nomination and was only attempting to keep the debate “principled and honest ” and “without distortions.”

What are the stakes of Liu’s confirmation? A campaign is already underway to promote Liu as a future candidate to sit on the Supreme Court, but a short-term objective must certainly bethe incremental drive to advance the Obama agenda. Taken as a whole, President Barack Obama’s domestic and foreign policies are the New Parochialism, a dangerous fusion of big government liberalism at home and a deliberate contraction of American power abroad during a highly unstable period in terms of our national security. Nominating liberal judges to key positions on the courts is a critical piece of the overall strategy.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has a unique position of being a mandatory waypoint for judicial appointees en route to lifetime seats on our highest courts; it is the natural strategic target of those who seek to realign the behavior of government with a set of values unlike those most Americans have taken for granted.

In that sense, the Committee occupies the crucial position on the road President Obama must travel on his crusade to transform America into something more like the European model admired by so many on the left.  A president able to control this valuable political territory defines not only the current political direction of the government, but can alter the overarching rubric for how government behaves in ways that extend far beyond the time when their influence can be directly applied.

The battle Republicans are waging over the Liu nomination is a prelude to the upcoming clash over President Obama’s soon-to-be-named replacement for retiring Supreme Court justice John P. Stevens.

Professor Liu’s nomination hearing is scheduled for Friday, April 16 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Savings time.

###

[This article first appeared at Red County.]

Related Articles

New York Times | Appeals Court Nominee Sparks a Partisan Battle

Michelle Malkin | Goodwin Liu’s sins of omissions

Hot Air | Liu nomination “in jeopardy” after “dozens” of omissions from questionnaire

Ace of Spades | Goodwin Liu "Forgets" To Include His Most Controversial Work on Senate Questionaire

Popularity: 1% [?]