Report: Trump has two candidates for Supreme Court vacancy

The two finalists are reportedly William Pryor and Dianne Sykes.

According to the National Review’s Tim Alberta, President-elect Donald Trump has settled on two finalists for the vacant seat on the Supreme Court: Judges William Pryor and Diane Sykes.

Alberta’s report should be taken with a grain of salt. It is sourced to “conversations with a host of conservative legal experts at this week’s Federalist Society convention…many of whom have had discussions with President-Elect Donald Trump’s transition team.”

Nevertheless, the claim that Pryor and Sykes are the leading contenders for the Supreme Court is quite plausible. Shortly after Justice Antonin Scalia died, creating the current vacancy on the Court, Trump named both Pryor and Sykes as potential justices — and this was before he released his list of potential justices that eventually swelled to 21 names…

Judge William Pryor was what is euphemistically referred to as a “controversial nominee” when President George W. Bush announced his nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. His opponents pointed to statements Pryor made as Alabama Attorney General labeling Roe v. Wade and the Supreme Court’s landmark criminal justice decision in Miranda v. Arizona as “the worst examples of judicial activism.” Pryor also described Roe as creating “a constitutional right to murder an unborn child.”

…Judge Diane Sykes is, if anything, even more conservative than Pryor. Like Pryor, Sykes, who currently sits on the Seventh Circuit, backed a voter ID law. She also wrote a decision expanding religious objectors’ ability to limit their employees’ access to birth control coverage that SCOTUSBlog’s Lyle Denniston described as “the broadest ruling so far by a federal appeals court barring enforcement of the birth-control mandate in the new federal health care law.”

Notably, Trump isn’t the only candidate to suggest Sykes as a potential Supreme Court nominee. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker did the same in 2013.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.