Postby dolfan » October 28th, 2005, 9:53 am
Personally, just me, I'd like to see him nominate Bill Pryor from Alabama. I know it'll never happen since he was one of the controversial 11th Circuit nominees that got confirmed on the bargain-with-the-devil deal a few months ago.
But, Bill Pryor is what every reasonable person should want in a Supreme Court justice. Experience, temperament, and treats the constitution in a way that is faithful to its text. He's been on the wrong side, in my opinion and -- for different reasons -- in the opinion of more than one court (including the U.S. Supreme Court) on some issues concerning religion in school, but just barely 'wrong' in my view. My problems have been the reasons he's used for his cases and not so much the bottom line stand he's taken.
He was Alabama's youngest Attorney General, succeeding Jeff Sessions after he was elected to the U.S. Senate. He's served with distinction and moderation as a judge on the 11th Circuit. And, when I say moderation, I mean it simply that he doesn't judge as a prosecutor, which is his practice background.
Of course, I'm biased. I'd love to see an Alabamian on the Court. The last one was Hugo Black. While a liberal, he was not one to toy with stretching the text of the Constitution. In the Griswold v. Connecticut case that paved the way for Roe v. Wade, he jumped all over Justice Douglas for finding in the Constitution a "right to privacy" as being an "emanation" from a "penumbra" of specifically stated rights. (I can tell you we spent a week in Con Law talking about Griswold's "penumbra". Our teacher was a socialist feminist -- no kidding -- and she got laid low by one of the brightest students in our class. Long story, won't go there, you had to see it, but it was sweet.)
Anyway, you had to love what Black said in his dissent in Griswold:
“One of the most effective ways of diluting or expanding a constitutionally guaranteed right is to substitute for the crucial word or words of a constitutional guarantee another word or words, more or less flexible and more or less restricted in meaning.... ‘Privacy’ is a broad, abstract and ambiguous concept which can easily be shrunken in meaning but which can also, on the other hand, easily be interpreted as a constitutional ban against many things other than searches and seizures.... I like my privacy as well as the next one, but I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision.”**[Disclosure!]
I like the Black opinions, on the whole. (See disclosure below for the can of worms one of his opinions opened that is not quite so popular with conservatives.) Pryor, I think, would be a text-faithful justice like Black was. (One of my favorite quotes by Hugo Black --- our black poodle's name by the way --- is "The layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional."
**On the other hand, Black wrote the case that killed public prayer in schools (Engel v. Vitale) in 1962, saying, " it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by government." In that case, the prayer at issue was actually composed by the government for recital.
Human government bears the same relation to hell as the church bears to heaven. (David Lipscomb, On Civil Government, 72).
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