Speaking of good liberal groups taking on interesting legal challenges (see below), I was thrilled to see that the Sierra Club is contesting Bush’s recess appointment of William Pryor to the 11th Circuit, which the environmental group believes is unconstitutional. (I agree with them.)
As you may recall, Bush nominated Pryor, perhaps the most right-wing judicial nominee in recent memory, to the 11th Circuit last year. Dems successfully blocked the nomination for 10 months, but the White House used a brief Senate recess to appoint Pryor to the appeals court bench.
Pyror’s nomination was opposed by thinking people everywhere, including coalitions of civil rights, civil liberties, and environmental groups. The latter was particularly concerned over Pryor’s public hostility for the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and virtually all environmental-justice protections.
But as Amanda Griscom explained in Salon today, the Sierra Club has a new challenge to Pryor’s status on the bench.
Last Wednesday, Pat Gallagher, director of the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program, submitted a motion to remove Pryor from the pool of judges to be considered for a case filed in Atlanta by the Sierra Club and Georgia Forestwatch over the licensing of coal-fired power plants. Gallagher requested that Pryor be yanked from the suit “not because of his radical, neo-federalist views of the Constitution — which make him unfit to make fair rulings on the environment — but because his appointment was blatantly unconstitutional,” he told Muckraker. If the Sierra Club is successful in proving this claim, Pryor’s recess appointment will have to be officially yanked.
“We’ve known for some time that George Bush has a court-plan agenda to pack the federal courts with extremists,” Gallagher added. “But in this case he’s used extreme tactics and violated the Constitution to promote his agenda.”
Keep in mind, this is more of a procedural move than an actual lawsuit. Sen. Kennedy suggested a couple of months ago that he may file a suit challenging the constitutionality of Pryor’s appointment, but he seems to have backed away from the effort.
So, does the Sierra Club have a chance here? It’s a long shot, but what does the group have to lose?
Some observers say chances are slim that the Sierra Club will succeed in its effort to bump Pryor from the court, given that two previous efforts to oust recess-appointed judges have failed. But the group’s lawyers rate their chances for success as “very high,” according to Sierra Club senior attorney David Bookbinder. “The previous cases did not make the argument that the recess appointment was not in fact made during an official recess — a scenario so preposterous that the judges [on the former cases] said it was one they would never expect to happen,” he explained.
I’ll keep you posted.