WASHINGTON — Setting a precedent, Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked the nomination of President Barack Obama’s nominee to a high-profile federal appellate court, formally reversing their past opposition to filibusters for judicial nominations.
On a 52-43 vote, law professor Goodwin Liu fell eight votes short of the 60 needed to overcome the GOP filibuster to his nomination — the first time that Republicans had successfully filibustered a judicial nomination. All but one Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, opposed ending debate on Liu’s nomination to the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Court of Appeals.
The Liu nomination, even more so than Obama’s two picks for the Supreme Court in 2009 and 2010, prompted the full ideological rhetoric that has been commonplace in judicial nomination battles for the past 25 years.
Democrats praised Liu’s life story — the son of Taiwanese immigrants who became a Rhodes scholar and Supreme Court clerk — as an example of the American dream.
Republicans, however, excoriated Liu’s writings while serving as a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, saying he adopted a legal standard of “empathy” that encouraged judges to try to view cases through the perspective of the people appearing before them rather than through a strict reading of the law.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and several other Senate Republicans who have opposed recent efforts to filibuster judicial nominees said Wednesday they would support such a tactic against Liu, despite their support of a GOP effort in 2005 to change Senate rules so that filibusters would not be allowed on judicial nominations. That attempt came after Democrats successfully filibustered more than 10 appellate court nominees of President George W. Bush.
Senate Judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told reporters Wednesday that a filibuster would fully reignite the battles over the federal bench and would assure that Democrats would do the same to the next Republican president’s nominees. “No good deed goes unpunished around here,” Leahy quipped.
The past few months have been a period of calm in the long-simmering judiciary feud that traces its roots to 1987, when President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate. In the past two months, the Senate has confirmed 10 federal judges; only two received fewer than 70 votes.
