Bill Pryor nominated to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals

It would be easier to believe that President Bush was serious about finding qualified judicial nominees, and sincere when he says he wants to remove politics from the judicial nomination process, if he stopped nominating radically conservative activists for the federal bench.

Since Bush took office over two years ago, the debate over judicial nominees has been perhaps the most contentious dispute between the White House and congressional Democrats.

The fight is fairly straightforward. The White House wants to reshape the federal judiciary with conservative judges who will advance a right-wing agenda. Democrats, still bitter over the GOP’s treatment of President Clinton’s judicial nominees, are doing everything possible to obstruct the worst of these nominees from taking the federal bench. Republicans blame Dems for the near-crisis level of federal judiciary vacancies; Dems say it’s payback time and the GOP has no one to blame but themselves.

It’s not that Senate Democrats are blocking all of Bush’s nominees, just the ones they deem the most outrageous. As the Washington Post’s David Broder noted yesterday, Judge Edward Prado of San Antonio, a conservative Bush nominee to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, was practically treated with kid gloves and received the support of every Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The lesson from the Prado example is obvious. Bush can nominate conservative but qualified judges and Democrats will support the nominee so long as the prospective judge isn’t an ideological activist with a record of extremism. When Bush intentionally chooses nominees with no judicial temperament, no respect for precedent, and a desire to use the bench to advance a partisan agenda, then Democrats will justifiably stand in the way. For every Owen, Estrada, and Pickering, dozens of Bush’s judicial nominees have generated virtually no controversy at all and have been confirmed by the Senate.

Why, then, does the president nominate people like Bill Pryor to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals?

For those of you not familiar with Mr. Pryor, he’s been Alabama’s Attorney General since 1997. His resume, in and of itself, doesn’t appear shocking. He graduated from Tulane Law School, where he was the law review editor. Pryor clerked for a 5th Circuit judge and later taught as an adjunct professor at Samford in the early 1990s. Immediately before becoming the state’s attorney general, he was the deputy attorney general specializing in constitutional litigation.

Pryor’s resume may not seem outrageous, but his record is. For my money, Pryor is not only the single worst judicial nominee Bush has sent to the Senate, Pryor is also the worst possible judicial nominee Bush could find.

As a Washington Post editorial noted last week, “Pryor is a parody of what Democrats imagine Mr. Bush to be plotting for the federal courts…. [T]his is not a nomination the White House can sell as above politics. Mr. Bush cannot at once ask for apolitical consideration of his nominees and put forth nominees who, in word and deed, turn federal courts into political battlegrounds.”

It would be foolish for me to even try to explain in any reasonable amount of detail all of the reasons I would argue Pryor has no business serving on the 11th Circuit bench. It would just take too long and I doubt that even my most loyal readers would want to trudge through 6,000 words on the issue.

Nevertheless, here’s a Cliff’s Notes run down of my objections to Pryor’s nomination: He abhors the principle of church-state separation and has worked with the Christian Coalition to do undermine the First Amendment, he is a National Rifle Association purist when it comes to gun ownership, he’s bent over backwards to help the tobacco industry, he is an ardent anti-abortion activist, he’s injected more partisanship into the office attorney general than had previously been thought possible, his appreciation for “states’ rights” borders on Strom Thurmond circa 1948, he has urged the repeal of parts of the Votings Rights Act, he has demonstrated contempt for an individual’s right to privacy, he has fought to undercut the Americans with Disabilities Act, he needlessly injected himself into the Bush v. Gore case at the Supreme Court by selling out the states’ rights principle he claims to love, and he really, really hates gay people.

I have a few more reasons, but I’m trying to avoid the appearance of going overboard. Over the last several days, this has become a minor obsession of mine. I’ll probably be writing a bit more about Pryor’s nomination in the coming days and weeks. If this isn’t a topic that interests you, I apologize in advance. Be sure to look for Pryor’s name in the posts’ headline so you’ll know to skip that one.