Josh Voorhees of Slate is reporting that Senate Republicans on Thursday successfully staged their first-ever filibuster of a judicial nominee, blocking a vote on President Obama’s nomination of Goodwin Liu to a high-profile federal appellate court.
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By a vote of 52-43, the upper chamber fell eight votes shy of the 60 needed to end debate on Liu's nomination. Forty-two Republicans and one Democrat, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, voted against holding a final floor vote on the nomination of Liu, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. (Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to break with her party.)
The article cited the Washington Post, which reported, "Liberals view the associate dean at Berkeley as the sort of aggressive jurist that they have not seen in Obama's most prominent judicial selections so far, but conservatives see Liu as a judicial activist whom they want to defeat today, rather than have him end up as a possible Supreme Court nominee years from now."
Imagine that — someone on an appellate court who isn't a conservative or doesn't have conservative leanings. Shouldn't there be some balance in the legal perspectives of judicial nominees? The Supreme Court is already stacked with conservatives, so is it too much to ask that there be someone with an activist background who clearly sees judicial matters through the lens of "social justice" on an appellate court?
Read more at Slate.
In other news: Former IMF Chief Gets Bail and House Arrest.
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