ALG Urges Senate Judiciary Committee to Reject Goodwin Liu for Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

March 23rd, 2010, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today urged the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject Barack Obama’s nominee for Judge to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Goodwin Liu, on account of what Wilson termed “Liu’s radical views on law and wealth redistribution that leave him far outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence.”

Goodwin Liu, a Berkeley Law professor, will begin confirmation hearings at the Senate Judiciary Committee tomorrow.

“For Americans wondering ‘how this happened’ in terms of Barack Obama’s massive takeovers of the nation’s health care and other industries, one need look no further than Goodwin Liu to see what Obama really thinks about what a ‘right’ is,” Wilson said.

“Goodwin Liu’s judicial philosophy that judges should render decisions based on societal consensus at a given moment rather than foundational principles is incredibly dangerous. He shouldn’t be on any court, especially not a court of appeals,” said Wilson.

As reported by National Review Online, in promoting his book, Keeping Faith with the Constitution for the American Constitution Society, Liu suggested in a podcast that “What we mean by fidelity is that the Constitution should be interpreted in ways that adapt its principles and its text to the challenges and conditions of our society in every succeeding generation.”

Wilson said that while Liu was “a smooth talker,” that Senators “must not excuse his views on ‘distributive justice.’ Beneath the ‘nice guy’ exterior, Goodwin Liu, like Obama, is a radical redistributionist of the first order.”

In a 2008 Stanford Law Review article, “Rethinking Constitutional Welfare Rights,” Liu discusses at length the concept of judicially-imposed welfare rights. In this context welfare rights mean a societal consensus that persons possess a right to certain goods and services, a consensus of “how a society understands its obligations of mutual provision.”

“The 2008 law review article is quite revealing,” Wilson said, “Goodwin Liu’s view of a welfare ‘right’ is that if the federal government offers a subsidy, a benefit or some other type of welfare, everyone is entitled to it, regardless if the ‘right’ has any place at all in the Constitution.”

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