Radical Obama Court Nominee Defeated

Council for America and its project Americans for Sovereignty opposed the nomination of Goodwin Liu to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Council for America and its thousands of supporters urged Senators to vote against cloture. Cloture failed and Liu was defeated.

Liu is yet another left-wing nominee of President Obama -- unfortunately, one of many. He is a far-left ideologue who is far out of the mainstream of jurisprudence.

On foreign law: Goodwin Liu states, “The 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.”

On understanding the Constitution: Liu states, “I think that to say that all we do is we look at the text and we read the words literally, or all we do is look at the text and ask how did the people in 1789 or the people in 1868 understand it – that I think misses an entire range of experience that the nation has itself learned and that judges can rightly take into account.” He also says the Constitution is “ a living document,” “indeterminate,” and determined by “socially situated modes of reasoning…”

Mr. Liu openly supports judicial activism and the belief that a judge can interpret laws to suit their own world or political views.

Council for America in its 2011 Americans for Sovereignty Congressional Scorecard will be rating a vote against cloture as a plus vote. The defeat of Goodwin Liu’s nomination stops yet another far leftist from having a lifetime appointment to one of the highest courts of our land.

Kagan Nomination Threatens American Sovereignty

Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court would be a threat to American sovereignty. She would move the U.S. Supreme Court further left.

Just look at what she has done and said:

 She unabashedly acclaims a foreign judge known for judicial activism as her hero.

 As the Dean of Harvard’s Law School, she denied U.S. military recruiters access to Harvard Law School campus facilities even though she broke Federal law by denying access. Her position was even overwhelmingly rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in an 8-0 decision with even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg opposing Kagan’s position.

 While at Harvard Law, she excluded Constitutional Law as a course requirement while requiring International and Comparative Law.

 In 2005, she supported the terrorists’ petition to civil review denouncing efforts to try terrorists in military tribunals. . She and three other liberal law school deans compared Congress’s bipartisan effort to clarify the laws on the War on Terror with the “fundamentally lawless” actions of a “dictatorship.”

 In the words of an Obama White House legal counsel, “She is largely a progressive in the mold of Obama himself.”

And let’s look in more detail at Elena Kagan’s praise – in her own words -- for that foreign judge Aharon Barak:

“I told [the judge], and I want to repeat in public, that he [Aharon Barak] is my judicial hero. He is the judge or Justice in my lifetime whom [sic], I think, best represents and has best advanced the values of democracy and human rights, of the rule of law and of justice.”

However, according to Seventh Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner, her model is an interventionist and judicial activist, one who considers legal interpretation to be fluid and “dynamic.” For Aharon Barak, the wording of a statute can take on “new meaning.” Posner writes:

“[o]ne of the most prominent of the aggressively interventionist foreign judges….[H]is book on judging is Exhibit A for why American judges should be wary about citing foreign judicial decisions…. Although Barak is familiar with the American legal system and supposes himself to be in some sort of sync with liberal American judges, he actually inhabits a completely and, to an American, weirdly different juristic universe.…”

Justice Richard Goldstone who was the chief prosecutor for criminal tribunals in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia concurs with Judge Posner and writes that, “[Aharon Barak] is unashamedly what, in U.S. terms, would be regarded as an ‘activist judge.’ ” Aharon Barak’s words confirm that a judge can practically generate a new law:

“The judge may give a statute a new meaning, a dynamic meaning, that seeks to bridge the gap between law and life’s changing reality.... The [wording of the] statute remains as it was, but its meaning changes, because the court has given it a new meaning....”

Elena Kagan’s praise of Barak needs to be investigated by the Senate. Is this the kind of U.S. Supreme Court Justice she would be?

If you can believe what Kagan says and writes, she would be an activist judge who thinks the Constitution has no fixed meaning and foreign laws should be given weight in determining what the U.S. Constitution means. This is not a nomination that bodes well for the Supreme Court, for the Constitution and for the liberties that Americans have enjoyed because of that Constitution.