From Powerline blog, a look at the record of Obama’s latest judicial nominee.

She opposed the church invoking the First Amendment as a defense to government intervention in hiring decisions:

Only four Republican Senators out of eight on the Committee asked questions today. Ranking Member Grassley (and later Sen. Cruz) inquired about a statement Pillard made regarding Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church v. EEOC. In that case, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 9-0, found that the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment bar suits brought on behalf of ministers against their churches under the anti-employment discrimi­nation laws, because churches and other religious groups must be free to choose their leaders without government interference.

Prior to the decision, Pillard wrote that the position of the defendant church represents “a substantial threat to the American rule of law.” This statement was the focus of questions by Grassley and Cruz.

Pillard tried to side-step the inquiry by confessing that she is an imperfect predictor of how the Supreme Court will rule (she was referring to a statement she had also made that “the big news will be if the Court decides [the case] for the Church”). This was a cynical evasion.

The problem is not Pillard’s failure to predict how the Court would rule; the problem was her radical position that the church’s invocation of its First Amendment rights substantially threatens the rule of law. Pillard was unwilling to defend this position, so she dodged the question.

The significance of the 9-0 vote in favor of the church is not Pillard’s failure to anticipate it. The significance lies in the fact that she took a position too radical for any of the Court’s liberals to adopt. In fact, according to Cruz, Justice Kagan described the government’s position in the case, which Pillard supported, as “amazing.”

She compared pro-lifers to the Ku Klux Klan:

Pillard did no better with a question from Senator Lee about her argument that anti-abortion protesters are comparable to the members of the Ku Klux Klan who were the subject of the anti-KKK post-civil war statute. Pillard made this argument in the context of litigation trying to use that statute against anti-abortion protesters.

Pillard testified today that the comparison is “not at all fair.” She explained that she had been forced to rely the anti-Klan law because there was nothing else on the books with which to go after militant anti-abortion protesters (Pillard hoped to use RICO, but the Supreme Court had shot theory that down). Pillard assured Sen. Lee that, because Congress has since passed legislation to deal with such protesters, there is no longer a need to use the anti-Klan law.

She opposes federalism, one of the biggest causes of American prosperity:

Finally, Sen. Flake questioned Pillard about her “transnationalism” referred to in my earlier report. He asked her about a statement in which, apparently, she indicated that international law provides a promising source of new rights for U.S. citizens, now that recognized domestic sources of such rights may be largely exhausted.

Pillard said she doesn’t agree with this view. She testified that she merely trying to explain to a Swiss audience the difference between our system and the system to which Europeans are accustomed. Specifically, she was trying to explain that we have a federal system.

I don’t have the statement that Sen. Flake was referring to, and thus cannot yet evaluate the plausibility of Pillard’s explanation of it. I can say, however, that Pillard is a less than ideal candidate to be explaining federalism to foreigners or anyone else. For she views “the federalism impulse” as a “sort of demonization of government” and an “effort to impede the ability of government to govern.”

Here’s more on her record from Life News.

Excerpt:

Among some of her greatest hits, the former Deputy Assistant Attorney General argues that abortion is necessary to help “free women from historically routine conscription into maternity.” As if her militant feminism wasn’t apparent enough, she takes the opportunity in some of her writings to slam anyone who opposes the abortion-contraception mandate as “reinforce[ing] broader patterns of discrimination against women as a class of presumptive breeders.”

A mother of two, Nina wrote a 2011 paper, “Against the New Maternalism,” which argues that by celebrating motherhood, society is creating a “self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination.” Those ideas bleed into Pillard’s extreme pro-abortion views, which suggest that technology is somehow manipulating Americans to consider the personhood of the unborn. In one of her most jaw-dropping statements, the President’s nominee even criticizes the ultrasound. She believes it manufactures “deceptive images of fetus-as-autonomous-being that the anti-choice movement has popularized since the advent of amniocentesis.”

As crazy and outrageous as her other comments are, this one is a denial of basic biology! She actually rejects modern science on human development because it conflicts with her hard-core ideology. If that doesn’t disqualify someone from the second most prestigious court in America, I’m not sure what does. Except maybe this: Pillard is so fiercely opposed to abstinence education that she has said publicly she would declare it unconstitutional. In “Our Other Reproductive Choices,” Nina argues that abstinence-only curriculum is “permeated with stereotyped messages and sex-based double standards” which, in her mind, makes it “vulnerable to an equal protection challenge.”

Wow, you can really tell a lot about Obama’s views on churches and pro-lifers from his judicial nominees, can’t you?