By Fred Jackson, Jody Brown, and Bill Fancher
President Bush's latest judicial nominee is being praised for standing his ground as he came under attack from senators opposed to his pro-life views.
President Bush has nominated Alabama Attorney General Willilam Pryor for a seat on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. At a Senate Judiciary hearing, Pryor joined a growing list of nominees who are facing attacks from senators who believe having pro-life views disqualifies a person from being on the bench.
As expected, Democrats on the committee such as New York's Charles Schumer led the attack with questions such as: “When you believe abortion is murder, how can you convince the public that you are capable of being fair?”
But Pryor also faced a grilling from pro-abortion Republican Senator Arlen Spector who questioned Pryor's characterization of Roe v Wade as being “an abomination decision” and “the worst abomination of the history of constitutional law.”
Pryor, a devout Catholic, responded that his own personal belief is that the landmark case is not only “unsupported by the text and structure of the Constitution, but … has led to a morally wrong result. It has led to the slaughter of millions of innocent unborn children.”
And despite those personal views, the 41-year-old nominee maintained they did not prevent him from enforcing Alabama laws that he may have found personally offensive.
As Ken Connor of the Family Research Council notes, Pryor stood his ground under “hostile” questioning and made no apologies. He speculates that Pryor's nomination will now face the same Democratic filibuster tactics that other Bush nominees have run into in the Senate.
Among those nominees expected to face the filibuster tactic is Carolyn Kuhl. John Nowacki of the Judicial Monitoring Project, who calls attacks on Kuhl “long on spin but short on substance,” explains why Democrats object to her.
“[W]hat it really boils down to is the fact that when she was an attorney working at the Justice Department, she was involved in writing the Reagan Administration's briefs in a case in which the Administration's position was that Roe v. Wade ought to be overruled,” he says.
Nowacki believes Democrats especially fear any woman or minority judge who holds pro-life views because they feel those views are too deep-seated in those kind of individuals. He says the Kuhl filibuster will prove the radical left is biased against women and minorities.
“There's this idea that women can't have taken a pro-life position, even when they're the attorney representing their client — and it may or may not be their own personal belief,” he explains. “We've seen that again in the case of Priscilla Owen, one of the other filibustered nominees, merely because she enforced the parental notification statute in Texas.”
Senate Democrats have allowed white, male nominees who with pro-life views to get a vote, but they evidently feel women and minority nominees with pro-life views will never compromise or change those views.
(This article courtesy of Agape Press.)
