Showdown Vote Looms on Stalled Obama Judge Pick

Senate Democrats plan to force a vote this week on federal judicial nominee Goodwin Liu. Republicans blocked the nomination of the Berkeley law professor to a seat on the Ninth Circuit because they are wary of his views on same-sex marriage and U.S. deference to international law, the Washington Wire blog of the Wall Street Journal reports.

The nomination of Goodwin Liu, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been delayed since February 2010. (Getty Images Photo)

Citing the BLT blog of Legal Times, the Wire says a vote on the liberal jurist, whom President Barack Obama nominated to the bench in February 2010, could turn into a major political brawl.

For starters, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., needs 60 senators to agree just to the preliminary step of ending a filibuster of Liu’s nomination. The Democratic caucus has 53, so Reid will have to recruit Republicans, and most remember that Democrats blocked several of President George W. Bush’s nominees.

One conservative legal scholar, Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has led the opposition in a series of essays describing Liu as an “unsound and unfit” nominee with radical and distorted views on the Constitution.