The Senate has blocked the nomination of Goodwin Liu to the 9th Circuit Court by failing to invoke cloture. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) joined all the voting Republicans to block the motion. This is very good news indeed. The 9th Circuit Court is already home to some pretty far-left judges (and is the most frequently overturned circuit court), but Liu would have made them look restrained and centrist. As Reason's Ilya Shapiro noted:
As I blogged last year, Liu is, without exaggeration, the most radical nominee to any position that President Obama has made. He believes in constitutional positive rights — not that the welfare state and all its accompanying entitlements (and then some) are a good idea, but that they are constitutionally required. That is, someone ought to be able to sue the government (qua the taxpayer) if they don’t have adequate health care, or food, or shelter, or… well, anything Liu envisions is part of his indeterminate Constitution whose evolving norms adapt to the times “in order to sustain its vitality in light of the changing needs, conditions, and understandings of our society.”
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Moreover, he’s opined that words like “free enterprise,” “private ownership of property,” and “limited government” are “code words for an ideological agenda hostile to environmental, workplace, and consumer protections.”
People like Goodwin Liu should be kept as far away from a judicial appointment as possible. And a president who wants people like Goodwin Liu on the federal bench should have his appointments blocked by any means possible.
