Ed Meese, the former U.S. Attorney General under Ronald Reagan, is stepping out in defense of an Alabama judge who is said to be on Donald Trump’s short list for president.
Judge William Pryor, a former Attorney General of Alabama, has reportedly landed among Donald Trump’s top three candidates to fill the seat of former Justice Antonin Scalia. Now, ahead of the President’s Supreme Court announcement, a handful of attacks are being lobbed at Pryor.
Surprisingly, they’ve not only come from the left, but also from a small faction of conservatives.
While liberal groups argue that Pryor’s conservative beliefs will impede the LGBT agenda, some on the right have held a grudge over his role in the 2003 ouster of Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore.
However, Meese is now defending Pryor as an ideal Supreme Court nominee, leaving little doubt that the Alabama judge’s “conservative bona fides” are intact. In an op-ed for the Heritage Foundation’s “Daily Signal,” Meese writes that antagonistic claims about Pryor “are simply wrong.”
“Pryor’s views on everything from morality to his faith to abortion to criminal sentencing are well known,” he wrote. “But more importantly, so is his fidelity to the Constitution—from his time as attorney general of Alabama to his service as a federal court of appeals judge.”
Meese argued that Pryor has acted not as an advocate for political ideology, but as a staunch constitutionalist who ” understands the proper, limited scope of the judiciary.”
“As Ronald Reagan once observed, ‘Judges shouldn’t be liberal or conservative, since the Constitution isn’t liberal or conservative.’ And as I have written before, “the judiciary is no place to be playing politics,” Meese said. “Though some are claiming Pryor is not an advocate of religious liberty, many of his decisions show that the exact opposite is true.”
“I know Bill Pryor, and his record demonstrates that Trump would be hard-pressed to find a judge more committed to these principles,” he concluded.
Trump will announce his nominee for the Supreme Court next Thursday.
