Senate weighs 3d controversial pick for bench

WASHINGTON -- The Senate confirmed Janice Rogers Brown as a federal appeals court judge yesterday, then turned to former Alabama attorney general William Pryor -- the last of President Bush's three formerly blocked nominees who were allowed through in a deal struck by 14 moderates last month to preserve the judicial filibuster rule.

A final vote on Pryor, whose nomination had been blocked since 2003, could take place later today. However, unlike the debates over Brown and Priscilla Owen, who was confirmed last week, the debate over Pryor is likely to go beyond whether he is a conservative extremist, as Democrats and liberal interest groups have charged.

Senate aides said Democrats are also planning to attack Pryor's ethics, reviving unanswered questions about whether he solicited campaign funds from corporations subject to lawsuits by his office -- and whether he misled Congress about it in his 2003 confirmation hearing and in follow-up written testimony.

Before his candidacy was frozen by a filibuster in 2003, Pryor testified that he did not know whether any tobacco companies or Alabama companies were members of a group he founded to raise money for Republican attorneys general races.

A former employee of that group, the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), sent Congress documents suggesting that Pryor may have called tobacco and Alabama companies on behalf of the group in 1999. Democrats were upset that Republicans ended a subsequent investigation before it reached a conclusion.

The issue has been dormant since 2003. Chellie Pingree, president of Common Cause, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, said yesterday that the investigation should be completed before Pryor gets a lifetime appointment.

''With all the dealmaking over the filibuster, people are just about to rush into this without saying 'Wait a minute, where did we last leave this?' " she said.

Among the Democrats planning to push the issue is Senator Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, a longtime campaign finance hawk. An aide to Feingold provided a statement foreshadowing the senator's floor arguments.

''We should have completed the investigation," he said. ''We should have finished contacting the people who know about Judge Pryor's activities."

According to a Senate GOP memo provided to the Globe yesterday, Republicans are preparing to denounce the documents as having been ''stolen" by a disgruntled former employee and insisting that the investigation went far enough.

''Democratic and Republican staffers contacted or attempted to contact 35 individuals, made 49 phone calls, and interviewed 21 people listed in the documents," the memo said. ''The interviews failed to reveal evidence that Pryor had improperly solicited funds for RAGA as alleged by the Democrats."

Democrats, however, complain that Republican staff told subjects that they did not have to answer any question put to them by a Democratic staff member.

The issue traces back to 1999, when Pryor, then Alabama's attorney general, founded the group to raise corporate money that would help more Republicans win state attorneys general races. His pitch was that Republicans would be less likely to investigate or sue businesses.

One pamphlet, for example, promised that Republican attorneys general would work with the business community and advance a ''pro-growth" policy by stopping the ''new wave of legal abuses." It promised donors special access to attorneys general at private events and conference calls for donors and featured a photo of Pryor listening to a lobbyist.

Its critics also contend that the group evaded state restrictions on corporate donations by having members send money directly to the Republican National Committee, which donated it back to state races. The RNC sent $100,000 to Pryor's 2002 campaign.

Such ''soft-money" funding, now banned, could include large corporate donations and commingled money from multiple sources, obscuring the origins of any donation the party later made from it.

''As a fund-raising strategy, it makes sense," said Larry Noble, president of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks the influence of money on public policy. ''As a matter of ethics, it looks terrible."

At his July 2003 confirmation hearing, Pryor said he did not feel the group's practices created ''any appearance of impropriety."

In later written answers to follow-up questions, he said he was ''unaware of any Alabama companies" being members of the fund-raising group and did not ''know if any tobacco companies were members."

The documents given to the committee, however, cast doubt on that assertion. The documents have not been made public, but the Washington Post reported that they describe Pryor as phoning two tobacco companies, Phillip Morris and Brown & Williamson, in 1999 to obtain $25,000 memberships from each, as well as raising $75,000 from other firms, including some in Alabama.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said yesterday that the Senate should not confirm Pryor without completing its probe. ''This aspect of the nomination remains a ticking ethical time bomb," Kennedy said in a statement.

Debate on Pryor opened shortly after senators voted 56-43 to send Brown to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The vote went almost totally along party lines, except for Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, the only Democrat who voted in favor of Brown.