PRYOR RESTRAINT

Dems plan Pryor filibuster: Assail GOP charge of anti-Catholic bias by opponents (Jonathan E. Kaplan, 7/30/03, The Hill)

"There will be a filibuster and we will prevail," Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said following a weekly luncheon meeting of Senate Democrats. "I would be surprised if there was not a filibuster." [...]

Meantime, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) scheduled cloture votes throughout this week in an effort to allow the Senate to vote on several other federal appeals court nominees. A cloture motion, which requires 60 votes, failed yesterday to overcome the filibuster of Judge Priscilla Owen of Texas. The Senate will take a cloture vote on Pryor Thursday; its failure would signal that the filibuster has begun.

[Alabama Attorney General William Pryor Jr.]'s nomination has been slowed because of an ongoing investigation into whether he lied about his fundraising activities while he led the Republican Attorneys General Association.

The Judiciary Committee voted 10 to 9, along party lines, last Wednesday to advance the 41-year-old Pryor's nomination. All nine Democrats voted "no, under protest."

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a former U.S. attorney for whom Pryor once worked, ignited the firestorm over religion at last week's committee vote.

"Can a person with orthodox Catholic views on abortion be affirmed as a federal judge? [Pryor's nomination] raises that question," he told The Hill yesterday.

Even Mark Shields has acknowledged that the Party is in fact anti-Catholic at this point because the only issue it truly cares about is abortion, Dems doing worst to lose 'Catholic vote' (Mark Shields, 7/22/02, CNN)

in a deliberate act of political bigotry, the Democratic National Committee is daily telling Catholic voters to get lost. Do you think I exaggerate? Then go to the Democratic National Committee website. There you will finds "links of interest from the Democratic National Committee."

If your interests include the environment or veterans or Gay and Lesbian or Jewish-American or pro-choice or African-American, the DNC will happily suggest dozens of places for you to spend time. There is under "Catholic" only one Democratic Party-endorsed site to visit: the absolutely unflinching champions of abortion on demand, "Catholics for a Free Choice." [...]

It does make you wonder if any national Democrat even bothered to read the Los Angeles Times national exit poll taken on Election Day 2000, which found that 14 percent of the electorate -- that translates into14.7 million live voters -- named abortion as the most important issue in deciding their presidential vote.

That same group of voters chose Bush over Gore by 58 percent to 41 percent, which translates into a Bush advantage on the abortion issue of 2.5 million votes in an election in which Gore nationally won 540,000 more votes. [...]

Uncritical, unrestricted access to abortion for all has become the litmus test for the national Democratic Party. The DNC may be run by single-issue voters. But Catholics, as they have shown to the consternation of conservatives time and again, are anything but single-issue voters. Will any national Democratic leader have the decency and the intelligence to apologize to Catholic voters for the Democratic National Committee's insults? I wonder.

It seems fair to ask whether it's possible for any religious person of even mildly orthodox persuasion to in good conscience be a Democrat.

MORE:
The Democratic Delay Democrats attack the Pryor nomination with questions, questions, and more questions. (Byron York, June 20, 2003, National Review) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 30, 2003 8:59 AM