Questions about the Supreme Court never rank very highly on American voters' list of concerns. But if there was one issue this election that kept Republicans in Donald Trump's corner even at his worst, it was the fear that handing Hillary Clinton the ability to fill Justice Antonin Scalia's seat would cost conservatives the Supreme Court for a generation.
Brett Talley
Saving the Supreme Court became for many the chief argument for Trump's candidacy, and Trump produced not one but two lists of jurists he would consider should he win the election. These candidates were highly qualified and uniformly conservative. But the Never Trump wing of the Republican Party didn't buy it. They argued that conservatives were naïve to think Trump would keep his word, speculating that any picks he would actually make would be as bad if not worse than Hillary Clinton's.
Now that Trump has won, we are about to find out who was right. Trump's decision will determine not only the future of the Court, but also the future of his presidency. Stumble here, and Trump could immediately lose the critical support he'll need to advance his agenda.
Fortunately for him, the choice is not a particularly difficult one. Trump should nominate the first person he named the day Scalia died: Judge Bill Pryor of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, who is from my state of Alabama.
Judge Bill Pryor is on President-elect Trump's list of potential Supreme court nominees.
Pryor's qualifications are beyond dispute. He is considered a brilliant legal scholar and is widely respected in conservative circles. None other than President Barack Obama — who likely agrees with Pryor on precisely nothing — nominated him to sit on the United States Sentencing Commission, a position to which he was unanimously confirmed by the Senate.
But unlike every other current member of the court, he didn't graduate from an Ivy League law school, didn't spend his entire career in New York or Washington and has real world experience, having served as attorney general of Alabama. And Pryor is a conservative; he is a pre-eminent defender of federalism, the separation of powers, and deciding cases based on the original meaning of the Constitution.
Which is not to say that Pryor's nomination would be received with universal acclamation. Far from it. Pryor would be a controversial pick on the left. During the Bush administration, Democrats filibustered his nomination to the 11th Circuit, and he was only confirmed as part of a grand bargain that saved the filibuster for judicial nominations — until the Democrats eliminated it for all but Supreme Court slots during the Obama administration. There would be pressure on Sen. Chuck Schumer to lead a similar blockade now.
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