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Schumer, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, added, “The meeting was very emotional. The two-by-four tactics of [our opponents] is uniting our caucus. I’ve never seen our caucus more united.”

Other Democrats said that they spent most of the time at the lunch discussing Pryor’s nomination to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, and that nobody would oppose a decision to filibuster.

Meantime, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) scheduled cloture votes throughout this week in an effort to allow the Senate to vote on several other federal appeals court nominees. A cloture motion, which requires 60 votes, failed yesterday to overcome the filibuster of Judge Priscilla Owen of Texas. The Senate will take a cloture vote on Pryor Thursday; its failure would signal that the filibuster has begun.

Pryor’s nomination has been slowed because of an ongoing investigation into whether he lied about his fundraising activities while he led the Republican Attorneys General Association.

The Judiciary Committee voted 10 to 9, along party lines, last Wednesday to advance the 41-year-old Pryor’s nomination. All nine Democrats voted “no, under protest.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a former U.S. attorney for whom Pryor once worked, ignited the firestorm over religion at last week’s committee vote.

“Can a person with orthodox Catholic views on abortion be affirmed as a federal judge? [Pryor’s nomination] raises that question,” he told The Hill yesterday.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), along with the Interfaith Alliance, a religious group, responded to allegations yesterday from Sessions and the Committee for Justice that they were guilty of anti-Catholic bias.

“Religion is the last refuge of extremists,” said Durbin, also a Judiciary Committee member, who challenged Sessions’s allegations. “That hard questions about policy is some sort of criticism about religion has no place in the public marketplace,” he said.

Sessions disagreed, saying, “Bill Pryor has thought about abortion. His decision is consistent with Catholic doctrine.”

Sessions argued that because the Catholic Church’s views on abortion are “mainstream,” Democrats “should ask whether his personal views are so strong that he cannot uphold” the law.

Durbin, who like Leahy is Catholic, said he and Leahy would propose a rule that “a witness or nominee cannot ever be asked about their religion.”

Leahy’s remarks were more personal. He said that nothing in his 29-year political career had “angered and upset me as much as this ... to brand me as anti-Christian.”

Leahy continued to attack the tactics employed by the Committee for Justice, led by C. Boyden Gray, the White House counsel to the first President Bush.

The group paid for political advertisements in Rhode Island and Maine featuring a courthouse with a sign that read, “No Catholics Need Apply.”

Leahy said: “Partisan hate groups that are breathing life into shameful history for short- term political gain. It’s saddening and an affront to the Senate. Injecting this religious smear is intended to chill debate on whether Mr. Pryor can be a fair and impartial judge.”

Article VI of the Constitution says that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the United States.”

Episcopalian, Jewish and Baptist religious leaders attended the press conference, along with former Rep. Robert Drinan (D-Mass.), who is a Jesuit priest.

Calling Pryor “a hard charging conservative activist,” Drinan said, “He is not as impartial as the lot of humanity will allow,” paraphrasing a line from the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.