Gus Puryear IV ought to be a shoo-in for a federal district judgeship in Tennessee, but instead he is under attack.
By all accounts a talented lawyer with accomplishments beyond his 39 years, Puryear is strongly backed by his home-state senators, both moderate Republicans. One of his avid supporters, David Randolph Smith, is the lawyer who headed the opposing legal team in Puryear’s most controversial case and a lifelong Democrat whose “political views are 180° opposite to those of Mr. Puryear.” Still, Smith wrote that Puryear’s “talent, temperament, education and experience amply qualify him for the federal bench.”
Another strong supporter, Thurgood Marshall Jr., is a former Democratic counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and a former Clinton administration senior appointee. And the American Bar Association’s review committee unanimously rated him qualified for the bench.
But Puryear is guilty of three political sins. First, he is a good friend with Vice President Dick Cheney’s son-in-law, and, as a former top debater in college, he helped prep Cheney for campaign debates in 2000 and 2004. Democrats who see Cheney as Darth Vader may want to cut off Puryear’s nose to spite Vader’s mask.
Second, Puryear once worked for former U.S. Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, who as majority leader (after Puryear left his employ) threatened a crackdown known as the “nuclear option” against Democratic filibusters of judicial nominees. Aha: another evil political mentor to spite!
Third, and most deadly, Puryear for seven years has been general counsel to the nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Public sector unions tend to detest private outfits that do their jobs more economically and effectively than their public equivalents. Sure enough, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, for which many Democratic senators act as lapdogs, is agitating against Puryear.
But the American public ought especially to resent attempts to demonize the private prison industry. CCA cites statistics showing that it builds or expands prisons in an average of 12 to 18 months, versus 36 to 48 months for publicly operated prisons. The firm says its operating costs average 5 to 20 percent lower per inmate per day and its prisoner escape rates and suicide rates are significantly below the public sector average.
CCA was not always known for such successes, but a key Wall Street investment banker told me he credits Puryear with playing a large role in the company’s turnaround earlier this decade.
That assessment tracks what I was told by Marshall, who joined the CCA board two years after Puryear started working there. Marshall, who said he has spent several hundred hours in meetings and conversations with Puryear, told the Judiciary Committee he has “a very high regard for Mr. Puryear’s legal ability, his judgment and his character.”
“There were a number of questions that revolved around actions and decisions made by some of his predecessors,” Marshall told me, “and partly because of that, I was very careful in my assessment of the management team. … If I had ever found I had a moment of concern [about the work of Puryear and other top managers], I would have walked away from that Board.” Instead, he said, Puryear’s responses to legal challenges “have been proper and clear, and he has demonstrated substantial legal skill in doing it.”
Nevertheless, Puryear’s nomination suddenly seems in doubt after the appearance of a particularly snarky and one-sided TIME Magazine article painting him as a dishonest, pink-shirted, mop-haired preppy who is a “favorite of G.O.P. hard-liners.”
But against Puryear’s large number of highly credentialed and respected supporters of both parties, the two main sources of specific complaints against the nominee are, first, a single disgruntled former CCA employee, and, second, a former CCA inmate once convicted of armed robbery and assault with intent to commit murder in the first degree.
The complaints of neither one withstand close scrutiny (as is attested to, in the latter case, by letters to the contrary by medical experts and by Smith, the lawyer who has served as Puryear’s opposing counsel in several big cases).
Senators have a responsibility to carefully analyze the records of judicial nominees. But they also have a responsibility to reject boguscomplaints about nominees with records as impressive as that of Gus Puryear. The man should be confirmed, forthwith.
