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Americans United Blasts Bush’s ‘Stubbornness’ for Re-Submitting Judicial Nominees

Posted: Tuesday February 15, 2005 6:06 PM EST

By Melanie Hunter CNSNews.com Deputy Managing Editor

A religious watchdog group is blasting the Bush administration for re-submitting the nominations of judges the group has urged the Senate to defeat. On Monday, Bush re-nominated 20 failed judicial nominees, some of which have been denounced by liberals as “right-wing extremists.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State Tuesday criticized the Bush administration’s “stubbornness” for re-submitting William Pryor and Janice Rogers Brown for nomination to the federal bench.

“This administration is bent on radically re-making the federal bench,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director, in a press release. “No one can take seriously the president’s suggestions of seeking unity when he doggedly pushes nominees who have advocated divisive, wildly outrageous views on some (sic) this country’s most cherished liberties.”

Americans United called on the Senate several times in 2003 to block the nominations of Pryor and Brown, claiming both have shown “great disregard and blatant disrespect for the First Amendment principle of church-state separation.”

During the last congressional recess, Bush appointed Pryor to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Pryor’s appointment is temporary and will expire unless the Congress confirms his nomination.

Americans United is opposed to Pryor’s nomination because he was an early defender of former Alabama Judge Roy Moore’s quest to block removal of a Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the state Judicial Building. Brown, the group said, “has also gone public with far-out views on long-established First Amendment precedent.”

The group wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 2003 detailing “Brown’s outlandish judicial philosophies.”

Americans United noted that during a 1999 speech at Pepperdine University, Brown “attacked” the Supreme Court for “relying too often ‘on a rather uninformative metaphor of the ‘wall of separation’ between church and state.’” Brown “stated that the high court may have been wrong in 1940 to assert that the Bill of Rights is applicable to the states,” the group added.

“Bush made promises to the nation’s Religious Right and he is under immense pressure to follow through on those promises,” said Lynn.

“One of his oft-repeated campaign promises was to shape the federal courts. His nominations reveal exactly how he hopes to shape the bench - he wants a judiciary packed with jurists who will constrict civil liberties, nor protect them,” he added.

“Just as we did in 2003 and 2004, Americans United is urging senators to stand against the president’s efforts to damage fundamental rights in America by moving the federal courts to the extreme right,” said Lynn.

“The moderates and centrists in the Senate must not be bullied by an administration beholden to a radical Religious Right agenda,” he concluded.

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