With Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter trying to have it both ways, the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday sent to the floor an unacceptably extreme nominee to a federal appeals court -- but not before some silly sniping over whether the nominee, Alabama Attorney General William Pryor Jr., has been the victim of anti-Catholicism.
The anti-Catholic canard, raised by a conservative pressure group and echoed by some Republican senators, would be laughable if anti-Catholicism weren't an ugly part of American history. Fortunately, excluding people from public life because they are "papists" is largely a thing of the past. Mr. Pryor himself is proof of that: Alabama, where he serves as the chief law enforcement officer, was historically home to Bible Belt anti-Catholicism.
But if some of Mr. Pryor's supporters are to be believed, opponents of his nomination to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals are anti-Catholic bigots. A pro-Pryor group aired television ads showing a locked courthouse with a sign reading "No Catholics Need Apply." On the committee, Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions referred to his fellow Alabamian as "this solid Catholic individual" and offered a convoluted argument for the bigotry charge.
According to Sen. Sessions, Mr. Pryor's views on abortion -- he has called the Roe vs. Wade ruling an "abomination" -- are rooted in his church's teaching. Therefore senators who oppose Mr. Pryor because of his denunciation of Roe vs. Wade are really subjecting him to an unconstitutional "religious test" for office.
Well, not really. The concern isn't that any Catholic judge will repudiate Roe vs. Wade -- Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Catholic, voted to reaffirm Roe in a 1992 ruling -- but that Mr. Pryor's vehement denunciations of Roe as bad law indicate that he is a man on a mission, despite his protestations that he would apply the law judiciously. The problem with Mr. Pryor isn't his religion; it's the fact that he is what we have called a "walking stereotype" of right-wing legal extremism.
(We wonder, by the way, if Sen. Sessions would rush to the defense of a liberal Catholic nominee who, citing pronouncements by the pope and America's Catholic bishops, denounced Supreme Court decisions upholding the constitutionality of capital punishment.)
Some Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who are themselves Roman Catholics objected to the Republicans' decision to play the Catholic card. Sen. Richard Durbin facetiously thanked Sen. Sessions, a Methodist, and Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, a Mormon, for elucidating his own church's doctrine for him.
The "anti-Catholic" discussion was an unseemly sideshow to the committee's decision, on partisan lines, to approve the Pryor nomination and send it to the floor. To his discredit, Sen. Specter, who faces a conservative challenger in next year's Republican primary, joined in that vote -- while suggesting that he might vote against the nomination on the floor. That straddle is the opposite of a profile in courage. If Sen. Specter thinks Mr. Pryor unsuitable for the court, he should have voted no.
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