Alliance for Justice Report in Opposition to the Nomination of William H. Pryor to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
Download 172.55 Kb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Separation of Church and State
Environmental RightsPryor has a very troubling record of opposition to federal environmental protections. He has questioned the constitutionality of significant provisions in the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Clean Air Act.56 Alone among the fifty state attorneys general, Pryor sought to weaken the Clean Water Act in a Supreme Court amicus brief he filed in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County (SWANCC) v. United States Army Corps of Engineers, a case challenging the federal government’s authority to protect critical habitat for migratory birds.57 Pryor argued that, if the Clean Water Act allowed the federal government to regulate small lakes and wetlands, the act was unconstitutional.58 In Gibbs v. Babbitt, Pryor filed another amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to reverse a ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had upheld the federal government’s authority to prevent the killing of red wolves on private land under the Endangered Species Act. Pryor argued that “[a]pplication of the red wolf rule to private lands cannot be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause,” and asserted that, unless the Supreme Court overturned the ruling, “it is inevitable that some other endangered species will find its way onto private property and cause a criminal prosecution, the derailing of a hospital project, or other injury to State and local interest.”59 The Supreme Court declined to hear the case.60 Pryor has also testified before Congress in opposition to the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement of the Clean Air Act. Under President Clinton, the EPA had begun to increase enforcement of regulations governing coal-burning power plants. Last year, Pryor expressed hostility for these enforcement efforts, suggesting that they interfered with state prerogatives: “EPA invaded the province of the States and threw their respective air pollution control programs into upheaval by reversing—with the blunt tool of enforcement instead of a collaborative rulemaking process—interpretations that are central to the day-to-day activities of state regulators.”61 Separation of Church and StateOver the course of his career, Pryor has been a vocal proponent of weakening the prohibition on state-established religion. In a 1997 article, Pryor expressed his lack of respect for this crucial constitutional doctrine: “Will the court continue to modify the errors of case law that created the so-called separation of church and state?”62 In a 1999 speech before the Christian Coalition, Pryor warned: “One of the greatest threats to (the) Judeo Christian perspective is the building of…`the naked public square,’ in which religious expression and religiously grounded morality are systematically excluded from our public life.”63 Pryor has been a longtime supporter of controversial Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore’s efforts to display the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court.64 In 1997, Pryor, along with the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed, attended a “Save the Commandments” rally in Montgomery, where he stated: “God has chosen, through his son Jesus Christ, this time and this place for all Christians…to save our country and save our courts.”65 When a suit was filed against Moore challenging the constitutionality of the Ten Commandments display, Pryor immediately announced that he would help oversee a “vigorous defense.”66 Last year, a federal judge declared that the monument violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and ordered it to be removed.67 Moore has appealed the federal court’s decision to the 11th Circuit.68 In 2001, Pryor filed a brief supporting the city of Elkhart, Indiana’s request for Supreme Court review of a 7th Circuit decision requiring it to remove a Ten Commandments monument outside City Hall.69 In that brief, Pryor compared efforts to remove the monument to the destruction in Afghanistan of two Buddha statutes by the Taliban, the Islamic fundamentalist group.70 The Supreme Court declined to review the case.71 When Chief Justice Moore was still a trial judge, Pryor had filed suit to defend Moore’s practice of having Christian clergymen give prayers when jurors first assembled in his courtroom for a trial. The complaint Pryor signed asked an Alabama trial judge to declare this practice--as well as an earlier display of the Ten Commandments--constitutional under the U.S. and Alabama Constitutions.72 The trial judge ruled the practice unconstitutional: “Judge Moore has acknowledged that through prayer in his court, he is promoting religion.”73 Pryor appealed the trial court’s decision. Pryor argued that the prayers in Judge Moore’s courtroom were indistinguishable from the invocation at the beginning of a session of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the clerk says, “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.”74 However, the prayers in Judge Moore’s courtroom were quite different. As Pryor admitted, “each of the clergy who had delivered a prayer in [Judge Moore’s] presence was a Christian” and often directed prayers to Jesus Christ or the Savior but defended this fact with Moore’s statement that “‘[T]hese jurors are . . . ninety-five percent Christians or persons who believe in God if they are not Christians.”75 The Alabama Supreme Court dismissed Pryor’s appeal on the grounds that it did not involve a real controversy between the parties.76 Pryor has also been a vocal proponent of the right to student-led prayer in public schools. In 1999, in a speech to the Christian Coalition, with whom Pryor is closely affiliated,77 he praised the “vision of Pat Robertson,” in establishing the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a religious right advocacy group.78 He went on to describe how he appointed the ACLJ’s Jay Sekulow to be a Deputy Attorney of Alabama so that they could, together, “[chart] a course for a victory for student-led prayer.”79 Pryor declared that his victory in court in a school prayer case promoted the “perspective of our Founding Fathers that we derive our rights from God and not from government.”80 Two major Jewish organizations, the National Council of Jewish Women and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, have publicly opposed Pryor’s nomination because of, inter alia, his opposition to the separation of church and state.81 Directory: blog blog -> Ap u. S. History presidents list the Young Republic, 1788-1815 George Washington, 1789-1797 blog -> Sci-145: Introduction to Meteorology Lecture Note Packet 3 Chapter 9: weather forecasting blog -> Critical Kent: The Topographies Project: Beaches (2015). Background notes for Explorations of: From Whitstable into the Thanet Coast blog -> Atlantic Basin and eastern Pacific they are called hurricanes blog -> Science 10 Is Weather Becoming More Extreme? Sarah Stride blog -> Heuristic Theorizing: Proactively Generating Design Theories blog -> Sportswalk announces 2011 inductees the San Pedro Sportswalk to the Waterfront blog -> Seamheads at sabr 40 Download 172.55 Kb. Share with your friends:
|