Trump's apparent first choices for associate justices on the Supreme Court are unfit to serve
While Donald Trump has been announcing despicable choices for his cabinet and other high posts that could easily be top contestants for Keith Olbermann’s old Countdown feature: “Worst Person in the World,” there hasn’t been much talk lately about his likely choices to fill positions that could shape U.S. policy for decades after his administration is dust in the wind. Those choices are, of course, who he picks to be associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Since Trump isn’t about to send Merrick Garland’s name to the Senate for confirmation in two months, one court slot is immediately available. But given the age of some justices, Trump might wind up in a position to nominate as many as four new jurists to add to the court by the end of 2020. One or more of his nominees could still be sitting there when Trump’s grandchildren are old enough to run for president.
Last Friday, Tim Alberta at National Review reported that people allegedly in-the-know are convinced the president-elect’s top two choices to replace Antonin Scalia are the same two he first suggested last spring: William Pryor and Diane Sykes.
No surprise, these are also top choices of the right-wing Heritage Foundation. For anyone on the left who cares about civil liberties, civil rights, reproductive rights, environmental regulations and the rest of the panoply of progressive ideals, these two would be disastrous.
William Pryor’s record is replete with right-wing actvism. He has labeled the Roe v. Wade ruling the “worst abomination in the history of constitutional law” and “a constitutional right to murder an unborn child.” In enacting FDR’s New Deal and other measures, the United States, Pryor says, has “strayed too far in the expansion of the federal government.” He says the federal government “should not be in the business of public education nor the control of street crime.” Indeed, he has a history of official support for states’ rights and an extremist view of federalism that several Supreme Court rulings have shot down.
From his judgeship on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, he ruled for the restrictive Georgia voter ID law, claiming that “racially disparate effects” are inadequate to prove a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. (The Supreme Court he would sit on has ruled oppositely.) In Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents, Pryor went a good deal further than the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling, arguing that Congress “had no power to legislate under the Fourteenth Amendment with respect to age discrimination because it was not concerned with a ‘suspect’ classification like race and national origin, a radical theory that would further limit Congress’s ability to protect individual rights.“
He has also attacked environmental protection laws, limits on privacy protection, and on the reach of the Americans with Disabilities Act.