National Journal’s Stuart Taylor has a good article on President Barack Obama’s nominee to a spot on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Goodwin Liu.

Elections have consequences and this is what you get when you elect a big-time liberal.

• Racial preferences without end. In 2003, in a panel discussion held by the progressive American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, Liu -- who later chaired the group's board -- called for reviving a constitutional justification for racial preferences for African-Americans in government employment, education, and contracting that would likely expand and extend such programs for many, many decades into the future.

The idea is what Liu described as "remedying societal discrimination as a justification for affirmative action." This rationale, rejected by the Supreme Court since 1989, is broader in important ways than the "educational diversity" rationale for preferences in university admissions that a 5-4 Court majority adopted in 2003.

Liu thereby embraced an idea that, Justice Lewis Powell warned in a 1986 opinion, could make "discriminatory legal remedies that work against innocent people... ageless in their reach into the past, and timeless in their ability to affect the future."

Indeed, Liu spoke of "societal discrimination" as synonymous with "historical discrimination," which, he could have noted, was committed mostly by people who died long ago. And he asserted -- more than three decades after affirmative-action programs were initiated as temporary remedies for ongoing discrimination -- that the need for such preferences "has only just begun" and that "the cumulative effects of societal discrimination will take a long time to remedy."

A very, very long time, if Liu and his allies continue to pretend that the huge gaps in educational performance that are the main cause of racial inequality today can be closed by discriminating against Asians and whites; by conscripting school children to integrate distant schools; and without far greater efforts by black parents to get their children to study.

• Reparations for slavery. Liu suggested in a 2008 panel discussion about responsibility for the slave trade that Americans generally, "whatever our lineage, whatever our ancestry, whatever our complicity, still have a moral duty to... give up [something] to make things right... whether it is the seat at Harvard, the seat at Princeton. Or is it gonna require us to give up our segregated neighborhoods, our segregated schools? Is it gonna require us to give up our money? It's gonna require giving up something." The graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School did not discuss the extent to which courts should order people to comply with this "moral duty."

Read the entire article and realize that Obama has nominated an amazingly dishonest legal scholar that Stuart notes is:

… left of all 41 Senate Republicans, at least half of the Democrats, and 80 percent or more of voters, I'd guess.

Liu would probably make a good successor to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi whenever she decides to retire, but he is seeking a job as a judge, not a legislator. Republicans should be able to gather enough support from “moderate” Democrats to defeat Liu’s nomination.