It’s Friday afternoon, so I guess we should have known the Bush White House would be pulling some offensive stunt. This one is beyond the pale, even for him.
In another affront to a constitutional system which he obviously holds in contempt, Bush bypassed the Senate — again — to install Alabama Attorney General William Pryor on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. (I say “again” because Bush pulled a similar stunt last month by appointing Charles Pickering to the federal bench as a recess appointment, which, not coincidentally, also happened on a Friday afternoon.)
Bush is effectively inviting a political war with congressional Democrats. Installing controversial judges without Senate approval is an unprecedented stunt that will not soon be forgotten.
For Bush to even nominate an extremist like Pryor for the federal bench was a radical move for the White House. Many, including me, saw the nomination as a cynical ploy: find the most radical, right-wing ideologue possible, invite a filibuster, and then whine incessantly about Democrats being obstructionists.
The ploy, apparently, was even worse than I expected. The administration actually wants this extremist on the appeals bench so badly, it’s willing to circumvent the Constitution to do it.
Just when I thought I couldn’t be more offended by the Bush White House, these guys find a way to surprise me.
In case you’ve forgotten, or are new to the Pryor controversy, allow me to offer a refresher. Pryor’s career has been marked by an unswerving drive to advance a radical, far-right agenda.
Pryor’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, he 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.
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 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.
And did I mention that he was at the center of a major fundraising scandal in which he was soliciting political contributions from the same corporations facing litigation in his state?
I’m certainly not the only one to notice Pryor’s record of extremism. The Washington Post described Pryor as “unfit to judge.”
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.
More succinctly, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution called Pryor a “right-wing zealot.”
One of my favorite commentaries on Pryor came from Nat Hentoff, in a column published, oddly enough, in the ultraconservative Washington Times.
Were I on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I would unhesitatingly vote against Mr. Pryor, because his clear record and public statements reveal that he would be the very definition of a judicial activist, letting his hostility toward key parts of the Bill of Rights determine his votes….
I would not vote against Mr. Pryor because he is a conservative — in the current battles over nominees, I would have voted for conservatives Priscilla Owen and Charles Pickering, because their opponents have distorted their records. But Mr. Pryor is capable of such extremism that a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision written by Antonin Scalia, rejected Mr. Pryor’s definition of federalism, which was included in his amicus brief and claimed municipalities have a “state sovereignty” right to be exempted from federal laws (Jinks vs. Richland County).
Not even the 19th-century secessionists advocated such reckless undermining of federal law. And Justice Scalia, dismissing Mr. Pryor’s argument, is hardly one of the court’s liberals.
I also enjoyed the comment from Hank Caddell, a longtime civil rights attorney in Mobile, Ala., who told National Public Radio last summer:
“If you had gone and designed a candidate for a judicial appointment who would be most destructive to the areas of civil rights, environmental protection, separation of church and state, reproductive rights, you would be hard-pressed to come up with any candidate other than Bill Pryor.”
And now this man, who couldn’t get confirmed by the Senate because his record is too radical, is on the federal bench because Bush is willing to carelessly disregard the constitutional system he once swore to uphold.
It’s days like today that I find it hard to hide my contempt for the administration.