What Goodwin Liu says passes for "Flowery" language

So much for judicial temperament.

A top Senate Republican hammered liberal law professor Goodwin Liu’s writings as “vicious, emotionally and racially charged” at his confirmation hearing Friday – igniting the first real test of whether Republicans will be able to block the most controversial of President Barack Obama’s lower court judicial nominees.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) slammed Liu’s testimony against Samuel Alito during his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court.

“Judge Alito’s record envisions an America where police may shoot and kill an unarmed boy to stop him from running away with a stolen purse … where a black man may be sentenced to death by an all-white jury for killing a white man,” Liu wrote. “I humbly submit that this is not the America we know. Nor is it the America we aspire to be.”

The testimony was “vicious, emotionally and racially charged, very intemperate, and to me it calls into question your ability to approach and characterize people’s positions in a fair and judicious way,” Kyl said.

Liu only acknowledged that this language was “unnecessarily flowery.”

The Liu nomination has captured the attention of conservatives on Capitol Hill because Liu has espoused a series of liberal views on affirmative action and interpretation of the Constitution, and his hearings are seen as a preview of this summer’s upcoming battle over Obama’s Supreme Court pick.

“Welcome to the Judiciary Committee and the Supreme Court nomination process,” joked Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.).

Liu, 39, represents “the very vanguard of what I would call intellectual judicial activism, a theory of interpretation of our Constitution and laws that empowers a judge to expand government, and to find rights there that often have never been found before,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee. . . .