George Bush ran for President as a moderate Republican but he has governed as anything but.
On issue after issue, he leads with his right and follows with a right. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his appointments to the federal bench.
On July 23, the Senate Judiciary Committee, by a party line vote, decided to send to the full Senate the nomination of William Pryor to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Democrats have correctly pointed out that Pryor has far right views.
He opposed the Supreme Court's recent landmark ruling upholding the rights of gays to consensual sex in the privacy of their homes. He's called Roe v. Wade "the worst abomination" of constitutional law in U.S. history. He supported the Alabama justice who "has officially sponsored sectarian prayers in the courtroom before juries and who has installed religious displays of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and in the state judicial building," according to People for the American Way.
As Alabama's attorney general, he defended the state's "practice of handcuffing prisoners to a hitching post . . . for seven hours without water or bathroom breaks," the group notes. And he criticized as "political correctness" the Supreme Court's decision requiring the Virginia Military Institute to admit women.
Now when Democrats pointed out these positions and opposed him as unfit for the appellate court, how did the Republicans react? They waged a scurrilous campaign accusing the Democrats of being anti-Catholic. Republican Senators, including Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, said Democrats are against Pryor because he's a devout Catholic.
According to a New York Times story on July 24, Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, asked, "Are we not saying that good Catholics need not apply?"
A Republican group supporting the nomination actually has been running TV ads with the same punch line. They "showed a locked courthouse door with a sign reading, 'Catholics need not apply,' " the Times noted.
This episode demonstrates the lengths to which the Bush Republicans are willing to go for one of their own. It's extremism in defense of extremism.