If Barack Obama had written the key essay in the most recently published issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, liberal Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee would be praising it.
But the essay, about the ways in which the concurrent demands of faith and the law affect public officials, was instead written by one of the recent judicial appointees whom those same committee members most vociferously opposed.
The essay thus serves as a rebuke to those liberal senators and to their practice of blatantly politicizing the judicial nomination process. That politicization has reached such extremes that Republicans threatened to “shut down the Senate” in protest against it on Thursday.
Their protest is justified. The experience of the essay’s author is a perfect case study of how liberal senators have mischaracterized the views and records of so many of the nominees they opposed.
The author, Judge William Pryor Jr. of the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, was blocked from confirmation by more than two years of Democratic filibusters before squeaking onto the bench as part of a 2005 deal arranged by the bipartisan group called the “Gang of 14.”
During his Senate hearings in 2003, committee Democrats repeatedly said they doubted he could rule as a judge to enforce a law that contradicted his “deeply held beliefs” — a clear reference to Pryor’s strict, conservative Catholicism, as evidenced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s criticism of a graduation speech Pryor made at his Catholic high school alma mater.
Yet within the following year, Pryor (then attorney general of Alabama) successfully prosecuted Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore for ignoring a federal court injunction to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the courthouse. Pryor himself supported the right to post the Commandments on public property, but not in the face of a valid, specific court order to the contrary.
In his Harvard Journal essay, Pryor discussed his approach to that controversy and others. The essay is eloquent, moving and, yes, judicious. Pryor cites as his judicial model a passage from the play “A Man for All Seasons,” in which the supremely moral St. Thomas More says, “I know what’s legal, not what’s right. And I’ll stick to what’s legal.”
Pryor’s point is that a judge is sworn to uphold the Constitution and laws, not his own conception of morality — because “the business of using moral judgment to change the law is reserved to the political branches, which is why the officers of those branches are regularly elected by the people. … The duty to administer justice requires the exercise of judgment, but not the employment of religious doctrine as a source of authority to supplant or evade the law.”
Yet, Pryor argued, this requirement that a judge put the law ahead of religious doctrine does not contradict his faith, but grows from it. Why? As a man of faith, his oath (including “so help me, God”) to uphold the Constitution means specifically that in public life he must put his duty to Caesar before all else, because his faith absolutely insists that it is his “moral duty to obey lawful authority.”
As a citizen, he can and should work to change wrongheaded law; as a judge, he must enforce it. In that way, he wrote, “my moral duty was not in conflict or even in tension with my legal duty. Instead, my Christian duty provided the foundation [through the oath] for my public duty.”
Result: While Pryor remains quite clearly a “conservative” judge, he has ruled a number of times in ways that produced results applauded by liberals — because he felt bound by existing law to do so.
As for Obama, he famously said this in a CNN debate last summer: “I am proud of my Christian faith. And it informs what I do. … We are under obligation in public life to translate our religious values into moral terms that all people can share.”
Sens. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, now Judiciary Committee chairman, led the fight against Pryor because they feared Pryor would act “in public life” in furtherance of his “religious values.”
Now both of them have publicly endorsed Obama for president, knowing full well that Obama, from a different faith tradition, has claimed his religious motivations (although not his pastor’s political rants) as a political virtue.
If they would only read Pryor’s whole essay, they might begin to understand the proper way to draw the distinctions.
