RUTHFULLY YOURS

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

6:34 p.m., Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Goodwin Liu, 39, is President Obama’s nominee for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. (Associated Press)

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday forwarded to the full Senate the appellate judicial nomination of U.S. District Judge Robert N. Chatigny, whose self-proclaimed sympathy for “sexual sadists” knows few bounds. Thus proceeds President Obama’s attempt to remake the federal judiciary into a den of criminal-coddling left wingers completely alien to most Americans’ sense of equal justice under law. Together, these nominees are dangerous to the American legal system.

Judge Chatigny: Declaring that a serial rapist-murderer’s “sexual sadism” was a “mitigating factor” that made him perhaps “the least culpable” prisoner on Connecticut’s death row, the judge threatened the law license of the defense attorney who tried to fulfill the murderer’s own request to end years of appeals. Judge Chatigny imposed sentences well below the recommended minimum in a series of child-pornography and sexual-assault cases and even tried to invalidate Connecticut’s version of the Megan’s Law sex-offender registry.

Goodwin H. Liu: This University of California at Berkeley law professor has argued there is a constitutional right to welfare and that the judiciary should be “a culturally situated interpreter of social meaning” that can “cue the policymaking process during greater deliberation and rationality.” Translation: Judges should help create law, not just interpret it.

David F. Hamilton: Confirmed in November to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Hamilton once ruled that Indiana legislators could not use Jesus’ name in an invocation but were perfectly free to mention Allah.

Edward Chen: As a federal magistrate in San Francisco, Mr. Chen objected to the singing of “America the Beautiful” at a funeral because of his “feelings of ambivalence and cynicism when confronted by appeals to patriotism.”

Louis Butler: While a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, he earned the name “Loophole Louie” for so often finding ways to interpret laws in precisely the opposite way from how they were intended. A law written to limit casino gambling thus became a law interpreted to expand gambling; a law written to expand the right to carry guns became interpreted as a gun limitation. And so on.

Sonia Sotomayor: Before confirmation to the Supreme Court, her litany of bizarre decisions and speeches included a ruling that currently incarcerated rapists and murderers have a constitutional right to vote even from behind bars.

This is just a partial list. Be very afraid.