Bill Frist may have already indicated whom he’d like to see trigger the nuclear option, but it appears the Senate GOP would like some options.
By midweek, the Republicans expect to have in place at least four nominees whom they regard as far better test cases than Mr. Griffith for a showdown over the rules.
The four are Janice Rogers Brown, William G. Myers III, William H. Pryor Jr. and Priscilla R. Owen. They were among the 10 appeals court nominees blocked from confirmation in Mr. Bush’s first term by Democrats who described them as ideologues who do not belong on the federal bench.
I’ve already discussed Brown and Owen in some detail. Myers, meanwhile, is the one who’s never been a judge, received a poor rating from the ABA, has been a lobbyist for the same mining companies that would have cases before him on the 9th Circuit, and has said environmental regulations are akin to King George’s tyranny over the American colonies.
And then there’s Bill Pryor, who hasn’t generated quite as much attention as his fellow nominees, and who will be the last of the group to be approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. He’s also the only Bush nominee who’s already been serving on the federal bench — on a late-Friday afternoon in February 2004, Bush sidestepped the Senate and appointed Pryor to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
But who is this guy and why is his nomination so contentious? Put it this way: if I were ranking the worst of Bush’s nominees, it’d be difficult to choose, but Janice Rogers Brown and William Pryor Jr. would battle for the top spot.
I’d strongly recommend going over the reports on Pryor prepared by the Alliance for Justice — they go into more detail that I will here — but 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 state 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.
In fact, on that last point, Pryor has taken a Santorum-like approach to privacy. Pryor felt so strongly about a Texas law that prohibited gay people from having sex, he insisted that if the law were struck down, it would open the way for legalized “prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and pedophilia.”
Actually, that’s kind of just scratching the surface. Pryor was also at the center of a major fundraising scandal in which he was soliciting political contributions from the same corporations facing litigation in his state.
By any reasonable standard, Pryor’s nomination to the federal court of appeals is akin to a bad practical joke. The Washington Post called him “a parody of what Democrats imagine Mr. Bush to be plotting for the federal courts.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called Pryor a “right-wing zealot.”
I was particularly fond of Nat Hentoff’s thoughts on Pryor’s background, published 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 sovereigntyâ€? right to be exempted from federal laws (Jinks vs. Richland County).
Not even the 19th-century secessionists advocated such reckless undermining of federal law.
Pryor will almost certainly clear the Senate Judiciary Committee tomorrow with unanimous Republican support. Stay tuned.