In New Hampshire today, the state Republican Party attempted to defend Senator John Sununu’s support of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito by calling Sununu “an independent voice for New Hampshire.”

People For the American Way President Kathryn Kolbert issued the following statement:

“If John Sununu is an independent voice, why has he voted for every single one of President Bush’s most extreme judicial nominees? On the most important votes he’s taken confirming nominees to lifetime seats on the federal bench, he’s voted in lockstep with George W. Bush. He’s certainly distinguished himself as one of President Bush’s most loyal allies; he can’t reasonably be called ‘independent.’”

In addition to his support of Bush’s Supreme Court nominees John Roberts and Samuel Alito (who wrote the anti-fair pay decision featured in People For’s recent radio ad) some of the other Bush judicial nominees supported by Senator Sununu include:

Leslie Southwick, who, as a state court judge, joined a ruling in an employment case that upheld the reinstatement, without any punishment whatsoever, of a white state employee who was fired for calling an African American co-worker a “good ole nigger.” The court’s decision effectively ratified a hearing officer’s opinion that the slur was only “somewhat derogatory.”

William Pryor, who compared same-sex relationships to “prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia.”

Priscilla Owen, a judge so committed to pushing right-wing ideology that even her then-colleague on the Texas Supreme Court, (and future Bush Administration Attorney General) Alberto Gonzales, wrote that accepting her view in one case would be “an unconscionable act of judicial activism.”

Leon Holmes, who minimized the situation of women who become pregnant as a result of rape, stating, “. . . concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami.”