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Before the 2016 presidential election, when both candidates pledged to nominate Supreme Court judges who would overturn court rulings they disagreed with, the idea of using a political litmus test in the selection of federal judges was widely frowned upon. A remark often held up as a classic example of the litmus test mentality, specifically with respect to religion, is this one allegedly made some years ago by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York, the current Senate Minority Leader): It's a misquote, however. Schumer never uttered such a sentence, although it does have a few words in common with something he did say during an 11 June 2003 Senate hearing on the confirmation of William H. Pryor, a George W. Bush judicial appointee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit: That's the closest Schumer came (that is to say, not very close at all) to stating what has been attributed to him. And although he didn't specify in that excerpt which deeply held beliefs of Pryor's he was worried about in particular, given more context it becomes clear what they were. The phrase deeply held came up several times during the Pryor hearing, originally in reference to the appointee's religious faith (Roman Catholicism), and subsequently in reference to some political views that may be said to follow from that faith (as well as other faiths). The first time the phrase was uttered was by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who brought it up, interestingly enough, to make the opposite point that Schumer would go on to make: It's clear from Hatch's opening statement that he perceived the appointee's deeply held Catholic faith as a potential stumbling block to his confirmation and therefore argued that it ought not to be: However, as Schumer made clear in his own opening statement, his reservations had not been allayed. Taking his statements in their fuller context, we find that Schumer was quite specific about what troubled him, and it wasn't that Pryor is a Christian, or that he is a Catholic, or that he is conservative. What troubled him was that (in Schumer's own opinion, of course) Pryor's incredibly strong ideology placed him outside the ideological mainstream. And in this respect he was referring to such issues such as women's rights, abortion rights, LGBT rights, and the separation of church and state: Schumer's concern about what he termed the incredibly strong ideology of this nominee synced up with previous statements he had made, such as when he said of Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft in 2001: We have found no record of Chuck Schumer's ever saying, Candidates with deeply held Christian beliefs are unfit and disqualified from serving as a federal judge. Perhaps the quote originated as a paraphrase of what someone thought Schumer meant when he expressed misgivings about William Pryor's views. But the quote attributed to Schumer doesn't really hit the mark, even as a paraphrase. Consider the content and context of what Schumer actually said. As in the earlier case of Ashcroft, he didn't raise an alarm about Pryor's religion; he raised it about the potential for Pryor to become precisely what Orrin Hatch argued he would not: an ideologue who would make rulings based on his personal beliefs instead of the Constitution.
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