Why Leahy Wants Liu to Stay on Schedule

[Dan Levine]

In what is becoming a full-on time suck for a few particularly devoted bloggers on the left and right, Berkeley Law Professor Goodwin Liu’s nomination for the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals is again in the news today. Sen. Patrick Leahy refused to postpone Liu’s confirmation hearing past April 16. Senate Republicans had demanded that Liu be pushed back, after he screwed up and didn’t turn over a raft of speeches and other potpourri that must be painstakingly analyzed by some unlucky staffer in the Judiciary Committee’s minority counsel office.

Beyond sending a firm message to the Republicans, there's another reason why Leahy wouldn’t want to delay Liu’s hearing. Four words: Justice John Paul Stevens. Should Stevens announce his retirement from the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, it will effectively suffocate other committee business, particularly on the nominations front. Liu’s bid for the circuit is already difficult, but fitting him in amid a Supreme Court fight would be a near impossible feat.

Comments

[Liu-Zer]

Liu's omissions just happened to include some of the comments he knew would be most incendiary and controversial. That cannot possibly have been a coincidence, or innocent oversight. Liu was thinking that nobody would notice. And if his hearing originally scheduled for March 24 had been held on schedule, maybe he would have flown in under the radar.

Liu's apparently deliberate failure to deprive the Senate and the public of his full record -- for no other reason than to enhance his chances for confirmation to a lifetime position -- is consistent with other ways in which Liu has displayed an appalling lack of integrity. His attacks on Justice Alito's death penalty views were not only demagogic, they were intellectually dishonest as well. In fact, it seems that many of his arguments contain sleights of hand, distorting both the facts and the law to arrive at a certain and foregone conclusion.

One has no choice than to arrive at the sad conclusion that Goodwin Liu suffers from a lack of integrity.

Little is more important to the task of being a federal judge than integrity. Yet, integrity is something that has few direct measures. Judicial experience is relevant not only because it reveals a candidate's temperament, but also is a crucible for testing one's integrity in applying the law.

For a lifetime position that requires the utmost in integrity and candor, Goodwin Liu has already demonstrated, at the tender young age of 39, that he is utterly lacking in both. If he cannot be trusted to complete a questionnaire on his own record -- with the clear intent of hiding things that might get in the way of a certain desired outcome, viz. confirmation -- how can he be trusted to make impartial and disinterested decisions on the most important issues facing our courts?

This nomination must be withdrawn -- or filibustered.

[ronny raygun]

if republicKLANs hate him so much, maybe he should be on the supreme court!