Pryor Impressions
Alabamas want to know why Bill Pryor is being filibustered in the Senate.
WSJ.com OpinionJournal
BY Quin Hillyer
Thursday, March 3, 2005 12:01 a.m.
MOBILE, Ala.--If judicial nominations represent the spear-point of all of the partisan battles in Washington, former Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor is the poison on the spear. Judge Pryor, whose renomination to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals could get a Senate hearing as early as March 9, has become a folk hero to conservatives nationwide while drawing fierce denunciations from liberal editorial pages. Come to Alabama, though, and the cognoscenti from all shades of the political spectrum find the controversy badly misguided.
Here, the Republican Pryor--at age 42, now serving a mere temporary appointment to the 11th Circuit--is the darling not just of right-leaning editorial boards. He enjoys near-universal support even from newspapers that endorsed Al Gore and John Kerry, from elected officials both Democrat and Republican, black and white--and even from the Democrat who Mr. Pryor defeated for attorney general.
The liberal Anniston Star, for instance, in the same editorial that urges filibusters against most of President Bush's nominees, writes that "Pryor, who possesses a brilliant legal mind, cannot be so easily dismissed. . . . Pryor has been proven capable of setting aside his ideology when it matters most. . . . [He] helped shut down [Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's Ten Commandments] sideshow and, in the process, displayed personal courage. That alone ought to convince Democrats currently blocking a vote on Pryor to give him a chance."
Why do Alabamians so strongly back Judge Pryor? Because they've seen him in action defending Democratic lawmakers against Republican lawsuits, defying the Republican governor (Fob James) who appointed him, and spending countless hours establishing a youth mentorship program through the attorney general's office. They know him, up close, as a man of integrity and compassion.
National critics have gone to prodigious lengths to muddy that home-state record. Unfairly so. Consider that critics have accused Judge Pryor of being insensitive to women because he successfully argued against one small portion of the Violence Against Women Act. But Judge Pryor's constitutional point was virtually incontrovertible, namely that rape doesn't qualify as "interstate commerce." His goal was to keep authority for prosecuting rapes in state courts, where (in Alabama at least) the juries are likely to be harder on rapists than elsewhere. Meanwhile, he has been praised throughout Alabama by groups that aid victims of domestic violence. Mobile's Penelope House women's shelter even named him to its Law Enforcement Hall of Fame.
The story is similar on every issue on which he has been criticized. Somebody served Sen. Dianne Feinstein poorly, for example, when providing her a quote from Judge Pryor that made it sound like he advocated the Christianization of government. But the quote came from a speech to his alma mater--McGill-Toolen Catholic High School, in Mobile--the point of which was not that the government should be Christian but that Catholics have a duty to be good citizens. (As it turned out, he was citing St. Thomas Aquinas, hardly a great threat to the American order.)
Critics have also accused him of race-based opposition to one portion of the Voting Rights Act. Why, then, is Judge Pryor supported by Alabama's lone black, Democratic congressman, and by its two most prominent black, Democratic legislators, and by its black Democratic National Committeeman? And on the case in question, Judge Pryor was backed by Georgia's black, Democratic AG, Thurbert Baker, who also endorsed Bill Pryor's judicial nomination.
Obviously, there is a disconnect between the interest-group and liberal-media assumption that Southern conservatives, especially Alabama ones, likely have racist tendencies, and the obvious reality of Judge Pryor's genuinely warm relationships with so many of Alabama's black leaders. Part of the explanation lies in the fact that Alabama has indeed come a long way since Bull Connor. Also important is that Judge Pryor's native Mobile, especially its old-line Catholic sector in which he grew up, handled civil rights with far more aplomb than Bull Connor's Birmingham--and with virtually no violence. Early on, then-Mayor Joseph Langan peacefully integrated the city's bus lines. And Bill Pryor's own high school, where his father was band director, integrated comfortably in the '60s, well before he matriculated.
Judge Pryor would say, correctly, that his jurisprudence aims at helping neither victims nor powerful interests, but merely at following precedent and the Constitution. In his closing arguments against the judicial vigilantism of Alabama's then-Chief Justice Roy Moore, he said: "In our system, a judge must follow the final decision of other judges, even when he is convinced they're wrong. . . . The answer this court must provide to every judge in Alabama is that no judge is above the law."
That's why, against his own personal predilections, he refused, as attorney general, to enforce part of a new state law against partial birth abortions: because that section contradicted clear U.S. Supreme Court precedent. That's why, against his own predilections, he enforced the very portion of the Voting Rights Act that he and his Georgia Democratic counterpart opposed. And that's why the leader of Alabama's top black, Democratic organization endorsed him as a judge who "will uphold the law without fear or favor," while former Democratic AG Bill Baxley said Judge Pryor always acts "without race, gender, age, political power, wealth, community standing, or any other competing interest affecting his judgment."
Yes, we in Alabama proudly support Bill Pryor. His career--as public intellectual, successful prosecutor, cultural-bridge-builder and man of conscience even at his own political peril--represents many of the traits the national media has always said Alabama lacks. Until he came along, our most famous exemplar of such character was the fictional Atticus Finch. Now that we can offer a real-life Atticus, we're more than a little angry that the Washington elites want to reject him.
Mr. Hillyer is an editorial writer for the Mobile (Ala.) Register. |
