Posted on 01/23/2017 6:44:54 AM PST by xzins
In the celebration of President Donald J. Trumps inauguration and the drama of his excellent inaugural speech the most important item on his agenda was left unspoken the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice to replace the late and great Antonin Scalia.
During the campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump released a list of 21 potential Supreme Court nominees that was met with reaction from conservatives ranging from general approval to ecstasy depending on who you Judge William Pryordefined as a conservative.
President Trump said several weeks ago, that he planned to forward a nomination to the Senate in the first two weeks after the Inauguration, however, since that time the Trump transition team has gone dark on who was in the running.
However, my inside sources tell me that President Trump has narrowed the field to four finalists: Judge Diane Sykes of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; Judge Neil Gorsuch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit; Judge William Pryor of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; and, an unnamed wild card thought by many to be Senator Mike Lee of Utah.
From my perspective, Senator Mike Lee would be far and away the best choice, but there is also one potential nominee who should clearly be disqualified based on his record and thats Judge William Pryor.
Concerns with the judicial record of Judge Pryor center on two of his activist decisions on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. First, in Glenn v. Brumby, 633 F.3d 1312 (11th Cir. 2011), Pryor usurped legislative power by purporting to judicially create without precedent and without constitutional and statutory support a new transgender civil right to employment, including a man's use of the womens restrooms in the workplace.
Second, in Keeton v. Anderson-Wiley, 664 F.3d 865 (11th Cir. 2011), Pryor affirmed the expulsion of a female Christian student from a state college for refusing to engage in a remediation plan of her views on sexuality which included the suggestion that she attend a Gay Pride Parade.
The details in these cases are very concerning and are provided in the Judicial Action Groups Research Memorandum Pryor Decisions in Glenn and Keeton. Pryor's rulings were inconsistent with the meaning of the law, and the intent of the Framers of the Constitution.
Those of us who were around when President George HW Bush appointed obscure New Hampshire Supreme Court Justice David Souter to the US Supreme Court will recall that at that time Souter was sold by the Bush White House as a conservative Souter had no record on the major controversies at bar before the Supreme Court, particularly the cultural issues and those related to the size, scope and power of the federal government.
However, Souters conservative bona fides were vouched for by White House Chief of Staff John Sununu and that was enough to get reluctant conservatives to forbear opposition.
Souters rapid evolution into a big government social liberal who regularly allied himself with liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Steven Breyer confirmed in the minds of many conservatives that they must oppose any Supreme Court nominee who did not have a clear judicial record of originalism and strict construction of the Constitution.
Fast forward to the administration of President George W. Bush and his attempt to nominate his crony White House Counsel Harriet Meyers to the Supreme Court, once again some conservatives were willing to go along with the Meyers nomination, but a strong coalition of cultural conservatives, led by Gary Bauer, L. Brent Bozell III and others, followed the Souter Rule and eventually forced the nomination to be withdrawn.
Today, with the potential nomination of Judge William Pryor of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, conservatives are not faced with an unknown quantity whose views and judicial philosophy are not on the record.
We know where Judge Pryor stands, and while he has a good record on some of our issues, his willingness to create new protected classes and endow them with judicially created rights unmoored to legislation or the plain language of the Constitution and his failure to protect religious liberty clearly disqualifies him from consideration as a replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia.
Nominating Judge Pryor would be divisive to the conservative supporters President Trump brought to his historic election through his promise of pro-life constitutionalist judicial appointments. In Sen. Mike Lee, we'd have a true constitutionalist who would be supported by the entire right, thus he would be a unifying nominee, and would be a more appropriate originalist heir to the seat vacated by the late Justice Scalia. Whats more, Sen. Lee could also have the support of more of his current Democrat colleagues in the Senate, where he is liked and respected.
The only possible explanation for Pryor in this is if he was being asked to decide on the wording of a particular law and he ruled on that wording and not on the constitutionality of the law in the first place.
I agree with you.
If Viguerie is right in this article, and I have no reason to doubt his fact-checking ability, Pryor really should be taken off the list.
Your information is incomplete. Pryor wrote a concurring opinion, writing that the 11th Circuit: "never ruled that a public university can discriminate against student speech based on the concern that the student might, in a variety of circumstances, express views at odds with the preferred viewpoints of the university. Our precedents roundly reject prior restraints in the public school setting."
But it sounds like he nonetheless supported the expulsion.
Doesn’t makes sense.
Judge Bean
Keaton never testified at the hearing held for her request for a preliminary injunction. She had ample opportunity to make her case that she would suffer irreparable injury, etc.
You’re right, it doesn’t make sense.
If that is what the LAW required; then you are right.
Isn’t Pryor a close friend of Sen. Sessions?
I don’t know.
I think he’s from Alabama, so I would be amazed to learn that he and Sessions didn’t know each other. But an acquaintance isn’t necessarily a friend.
Bottom line, though, is that I don’t know.
President Donald Trump won the election without the help of Mike Lee who joined Romney and others to undermine and defeat him. In October Lee even urged Trump to withdraw from the race. Good info on Lee and his interest in trade just by typing his name and Trump on the net and read all of the actions Lee took to protect Utah interests. Conservative Treehouse had an article about Lee recently. A Globalist or a sympathetic follower would not be a good, America First, Supreme Court Justice. Utah did, in spite of Romney and Lee and other Utah Republicans, vote for Trump and helped him to win. If Lee had prevailed the globalists would have won, and destroyed, this Republic.
"A woman wrote this. I'm impressed:
"It's true that Second Amendment litigation is new, and Chicago's ordinance is unlike any firearms law that has received appellate review since Heller. But that doesn't mean we are without a framework for how to proceed. The Supreme Court's approach to deciding Heller points in a general direction. Although the critical question in Heller - whether the Amendment secures an individual or collective right - was interpretive rather than doctrinal, the Court's decision method is instructive.With little precedent to synthesize, Heller focused almost exclusively on the original public meaning of the Second Amendment, consulting the text and relevant historical materials to determine how the Amendment was understood at the time of ratification. This inquiry led the Court to conclude that the Second Amendment secures a pre-existing natural right to keep and bear arms; that the right is personal and not limited to militia service; and that the "central component of the right" is the right of armed self-defense, most notably in the home." - Judge Diane Sykes, Ezell v. Chicago, 651 F. 3d 684 - Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit 2011, as quoted here; also note as Volokh summated here:
"The "plaintiffs are the 'law-abiding, responsible citizens' whose Second Amendment rights are entitled to full solicitude under Heller ... The City's firing-range ban is not merely regulatory; it prohibits the 'law-abiding, responsible citizens' of Chicago from engaging in target practice in the controlled environment of a firing range. This is a serious encroachment on the right to maintain proficiency in firearm use, an important corollary to the meaningful exercise of the core right to possess firearms for self-defense."
After reading through the case , the court made the correct decision.
There was an article yesterday in the Daily Caller website, that Judge Neil Gorsuch of the 10th Court of Appeals is the new front-runner. He’s only 49 years old, has a stellar reputation, and has clerked for Justice Kennedy. They said he was one of the finest writers on the bench. He was easily nominated to the bench by President GWB in 2006 and was considered non-controversial.
What’s the FReep opinion about him?
Diane Sykes would be his woman appointee with a solid conservative record. Only negative is that she is already over the 60 y.o. “barrier” for a nominee.
Considering that women live a lot longer than men, I think that could be overlooked.
Cruz is a liar.
Anyone associated with Kennedy is instantly suspect.
Perhaps, but I went googling and I like what I found on Gorsuch. They say he’s very close to Scalia in many ways...
From Ballotpedia:
“In a December 2016 study, scholars and attorneys Jeremy Kidd, Riddhi Sohan Dasgupta, Ryan Walter, and James Phillips identified Gorsuch as one of the two most natural successors to Justice Scalia based on a measure of their own design. Among Trump’s known potential nominees, only Judge Thomas Lee of the Supreme Court of Utah had a higher score on the authors’ measure.”
Scotusblog said:
“Both his pre-judicial resumé and his body of work as a judge make him a natural fit for an appointment to the Supreme Court by a Republican president. He is relatively young (turning 50 this year), and his background is filled with sterling legal and academic credentials. He was a Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford, graduated from Harvard Law School, clerked for prominent conservative judges (Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as well as Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court), and was a high-ranking official in the Bush Justice Department before his judicial appointment. He is celebrated as a keen legal thinker and a particularly incisive legal writer, with a flair that matches or at least evokes that of the justice whose seat he would be nominated to fill. In fact, one study has identified him as the most natural successor to Justice Antonin Scalia on the Trump shortlist, both in terms of his judicial style and his substantive approach.
With perhaps one notable area of disagreement, Judge Gorsuchs prominent decisions bear the comparison out. For one thing, the great compliment that Gorsuchs legal writing is in a class with Scalias is deserved: Gorsuchs opinions are exceptionally clear and routinely entertaining; he is an unusual pleasure to read, and it is always plain exactly what he thinks and why. Like Scalia, Gorsuch also seems to have a set of judicial/ideological commitments apart from his personal policy preferences that drive his decision-making. He is an ardent textualist (like Scalia); he believes criminal laws should be clear and interpreted in favor of defendants even if that hurts government prosecutions (like Scalia); he is skeptical of efforts to purge religious expression from public spaces (like Scalia); he is highly dubious of legislative history (like Scalia); and he is less than enamored of the dormant commerce clause (like Scalia). In fact, some of the parallels can be downright eerie.”
Sounds like another east coast, ivy league, Roman Catholic addition to our east coast, ivy league, Catholic/Jewish supreme court.
There’s a surprise.
If he really is like Scalia, another ‘Sca-lito’, that would be ok by me. Maybe he could even influence Scotus Judge Kennedy to the right. He should be pro-life though, and President Trump promised the next SCOTUS appointment would be.
This is all based on assumption. The nominee could be someone else entirely. We’ll see.
Point taken; I can’t say I blame you.
She’s on Trump’s list of prospective justices.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442220/trump-supreme-court-picks-should-start-woman
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