Ninth Circuit nominee Goodwin Liu’s hearing apparently will go forward today at 10:00, notwithstanding Republican objections to the short period of time that’s been available to review Liu’s large fourth supplemental submission. If you’d like to watch the hearing live, you should be able to do so via a link that should appear on this site. (I expect to be largely occupied on other matters, but I look forward to reviewing the transcript.)
If this Politico op-ed by Eric Liu (no relation to the nominee) is any indication, Liu’s defenders seem more eager to run from the nominee’s views than defend them. Eric Liu obscures from the reader the inconvenient facts that Goodwin Liu has urged judicial invention (usually in an “interstitial” role) of constitutional rights to a broad range of social “welfare” goods, including education, shelter, subsistence, and health care. Evidently adopting the narrowest possible definition of a quota (under which nothing is ever a quota), Eric Liu claims that Goodwin Liu thinks that “quotas are unconstitutional”—and utterly ignores his ardent support for pervasive racial preferences (and his conveniently undisclosed plea for contrary Supreme Court rulings to “be cast into the dustbin of history.”) And he fails to confront the nominee’s actual comments on reparations for slavery.
My NRO essay on Goodwin Liu is here, and my inventory of selected blog posts is here.