Short List Now Just Two Judges
In a rare moment of good news Judge William Pryor, whose public anti-LGBT comments are offensive and vile, has been dropped from the short list of President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court justice nominees.Â
NBC News Justice Correspondent Pete Williams on MSNBC just after noon told Andrea Mitchell Pryor is out of the running. It is likely the Trump White House saw the Alabama federal judge as too controversial.
Trump Monday morning announced he is moving up his announcement of who he will nominate to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last February, almost a full year ago.
It will likely either be Judge Neil Gorsuch or Judge Thomas Hardiman, according to Williams. Both are conservatives.
Gorsuch, who is only 49, sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, Hardiman, 51, on the 11th.
Trump had met with Pryor two weeks ago.
As Alabama Attorney General, Pryor infamously had signed an amicus brief in 2003, arguing that bans on same-sex sex are not only constitutional, but morally correct. It compared gay sex to “prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia.”
Pryor in 2005 was named “the most demonstrably anti-gay judicial nominee in recent memory,†by Lambda Legal.
Curiously, the extreme religious right also opposes a Pryor nomination.Â
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