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. . . .

Goodwin Liu left out information on over 117 speeches, publications, and other materials from his judicial nomination materials

This appears to be an unprecedented attempt by a judicial nominee to hide his record.

Senate Republicans on Tuesday slammed one of the Obama administration's most controversial judicial nominees for failing to initially disclose more than 100 of his speeches, publications and other background materials -- an omission the Republicans called unprecedented and a possible attempt to "hide his most controversial work."

They said Goodwin Liu's nomination to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is in "jeopardy" in light of the problem.

The complaint came after Liu, a Berkeley law professor, gave the Senate Judiciary Committee a bundle of supplemental material that contained 117 things he left out after his February nomination.

Among the items disclosed were several speeches on affirmative action and his participation at an event co-sponsored by the Center for Social Justice at Berkeley and the the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group.

In response to the new information, all seven Republicans on the Judiciary Committee fired off a letter to its chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., demanding that Liu's hearing be postponed again.

Liu's hearing already has been postponed twice, and Republicans have mounted somewhat of a campaign against him -- targeting him for his writings suggesting health care is a right and describing the Constitution as a document that should adapt to changes in the world.

The omissions didn't help his case.

"At best, this nominee's extraordinary disregard for the committee's constitutional role demonstrates incompetence; at worst, it creates the impression that he knowingly attempted to hide his most controversial work from the committee," the Republicans wrote in the letter to Leahy Tuesday. "Professor Liu's unwillingness to take seriously his obligation to complete these basic forms is potentially disqualifying and has placed his nomination in jeopardy."

The letter said Liu only provided the extra material after committee staff had found a number of omissions in the packet he gave up front.

"These are not minor omissions," the letter said. . . .