I’ll readily excuse any readers who have no interest in any further debate over the record of a nominee who has already been defeated, but I figured that I might as well follow up on this post of mine from last week on a Los Angeles Times op-ed by Ian Millhiser lamenting the defeat of Goodwin Liu’s nomination. Rigidly enforcing a 150-word limit, the LA Times did publish a letter from me responding to Millhiser’s piece. Spared of that limit here, I’ll post my original (somewhat longer) submission to the Times:

Ian Millhiser’s defense of Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu ignores the comprehensive and meticulous case that I and others built against Liu. On the only two criticisms that Millhiser does engage, he gets things badly wrong.
Millhiser’s claim that Liu’s “stance on constitutional welfare rights” is “similar” to Justice Scalia’s is absurd. Liu maintains that it’s the role of judges to determine “whether our collective values on a given issue have converged to a degree that they can be persuasively crystallized and credibly absorbed into legal doctrine,” and he used that gobbledygook to conclude that courts should strike down California’s school-finance system. So much for his supposed belief in a modest judicial role.
Millhiser also contends that Liu’s testimony against the confirmation of Justice Alito was “scrupulously accurate.” But Millhiser simply repeats Liu’s demagogic confusion between the role of the courts and the role of the legislature. Alito never “argued that cops should be allowed to shoot a purse-snatcher in the back to prevent him from getting away with 10 stolen dollars.” Alito’s position, rather, was that the Constitution left “for legislative rather than judicial resolution” the issue whether the traditional rule permitting the use of deadly force against fleeing felons should be modified or eliminated—the same position that Justice O’Connor took.
There’s ample reason that Liu tried to run away from his radical record at his confirmation hearing, and the defeat of his nomination is a victory for the Constitution.