Calling All Dirty Fucking Hippie Lawyers

I don't know who the most liberal lawyers in the country is right now - Alan Grayson comes to mind - but whoever it is, that's who President Obama needs to nominate to the Supreme Court to replace soon-to-retire Justice John Paul Stephens.

Because it's going to take the appointment of at least four more-liberal-than-you-can-possibly-imagine Justices to return the Court to its relatively balanced makeup of 30 years ago. By which standard Sonia Sotomayor is a moderate.

And to truly turn the court back into the liberal activist Warren Court that made the Constitutional promise of equal rights for all into reality, to undo the far-right, anti-Democratic radicalism of Chief Justice John Roberts and his henchmen Alito, Scalia and Thomas, it's going to take at least five real liberals.

Katrina van den Heuvel explains:

What is needed today--in the face of a sustained conservative assault on the courts--is a series of appointments to the Supreme Court and the federal bench that could truly be described as "courageous." Not as "clever," in a political sense, not as "expedient," but as bold. John Paul Stevens has been such a justice--his retirement will reportedly come at the end of this term--and we will need more like him if reform is not to hit an insurmountable obstacle at the courthouse door.

George Bush pushed the courts sharply to the right and we've seen the consequences. At the end of his first year in office, Obama has made just half of the appointments of his predecessor to the federal appeals and district courts, despite a similar number of vacancies.

It's impossible to overstate the challenges currently on the President's plate. But the Citizens United decision serves as a reminder of the fact that he can't lose sight of judicial appointments. President Obama must use this moment to move aggressively and boldly to restore balance and sanity to our courts.

Back in December, Kevin Drum deplored the way Senate repugs were playing President Obama for a patsy by refusing to approve even his milquetoast, moderate nominees.

Republicans are engaged in full-on obstruction of everyone Obama nominates no matter what. So why bother trying to make nice? If Republicans are going to do the scorched-earth thing regardless, why not nominate some real liberals? Scott Lemieux agrees:

I'm generally wary of the idea that Congress would magically start generating better policy if Obama would just become more uncompromising. But with respect to judicial appointments, Obama's preemptive concessions really have been counterproductive. It's not at all surprising that his attempts to put forward moderate appointments is not working — after all, we're dealing with conservatives willing to claim that Cass Sunstein is a wide-eyed radical.

And, what's worse, putting forward moderate nominees will continue the asymmetry in which Republican presidents take the ideological direction of the federal courts very seriously while Democratic presidents are willing to settle for moderates to focus on other priorities. There's no reason to continue this. Given that Republicans will portray anyone to the left of Anthony Kennedy as a lawless Trotskyite, Obama needs to make stronger liberal appointments and accept that not everyone will get confirmed.

I assume the question here is "when," not "if." Obama clearly seems dedicated to a program of compromise and bipartisan comity, and he wants to keep at it long enough to give it a real chance of working. But how long is long enough? I never really believed Republicans were ever likely to respond to olive branches in the first place — they need a few more years in the wilderness before they're willing to really take stock of the corner they've painted themselves into — so I'm not a good judge of this. But it's been nearly a year now and Republicans, if anything, are more intransigent than they were on inauguration day. How much longer does Obama give them? Another year? Two? At what point does he finally give up and decide that he's just being played for a patsy?

It may have happened last month, when President Obama appointed a genuine young liberal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

From Crooks and Liars:

Credit where credit is due - this is a solid liberal appointment and a noted constitutional scholar -- things that paint a target on his back to the anti-intellectual right wing. Liu isn't a "safe" choice, so I have to assume Obama's prepared to go to the mat for him, since the usual suspects are already smearing him:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Thirteen months into his presidency, Barack Obama finally gave liberal supporters the kind of judicial nominee they had sought and conservatives feared.

Goodwin Liu, 39, is an unabashed liberal legal scholar who, if confirmed, could become a force on the federal appeals court for decades. There's talk that in time, the Rhodes Scholar, former high court clerk and current assistant dean and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, could be the first person of Asian descent chosen for the Supreme Court.

"I can easily imagine him" as a high court nominee, said Erwin Chemerinsky, a Liu supporter and dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine.
Obama's choice of Liu for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco drew quick and vociferous criticism from conservatives. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, described Liu as "far outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence."

For the first time, Obama seemed to be taking a page from the playbook of recent Republican presidents who nominated conservatives in their 30s and 40s with the expectation they would have enduring influence in setting policy on the federal bench.

Let Goodwin Liu be the most conservative of President Obama's court appointees from now on, and we might actually be getting someplace.