Outrage over Ashcroft hearings

The attack on Sen. John Ashcroft's nomination to be U.S. attorney general has been hysterical and sometimes incomprehensible. It's not even really about him. His leftist opponents are simply in denial about the presidential election outcome, refuse to accept conservative ideas as legitimate and are focus-grouping assault tactics in preparation for the next Supreme Court nomination. Since too many outrages vie for any top-10 list, here are 10 of the worst.

Outrage 1: Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., claimed that "on battles over executive branch or judicial nominees, Senator Ashcroft was not just in the minority of the United States Senate, but in a minority among Republicans in the Senate." This public relations effort to paint Ashcroft as an extremist fringe-dweller just isn't true.

Sen. Ashcroft voted against 12 of the 245 judicial nominees considered during his tenure, less than 5 percent. One of them -- Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ronnie White, nominated to the U.S. District Court -- was defeated, leaving Leahy the one in the minority. The nominees Ashcroft opposed received an average of 32 no votes, the large majority of Republicans, compared to an average of 17 no votes against all opposed nominees. And on other controversial executive branch nominees, Ashcroft was one of 35 senators (64 percent of Republicans) to vote against the nomination of David Satcher to be U.S. surgeon general and one of 43 senators (81 percent of Republicans) to vote against Henry Foster for the same position. Even lawyers ought to handle simple math. Does it sound too stupid to say that a majority of Republicans is not "a minority of Republicans"?

Outrage 2: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said that "Mr. Ashcroft's past positions on [issues including] segregation … are very different from my own." She is claiming, of course, that someone -- either she or Ashcroft -- actually supports segregation. Similarly, Leahy said the nominee "fought voluntary school desegregation." These are outright lies.

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Forced into the political version of "I no longer beat my wife," Ashcroft responded thus to Leahy: "Nothing could be farther from the truth. I don't oppose desegregation, I repudiate segregation." And a minute later, he repeated that "I have always opposed segregation." The accusation and denial stemmed from Ashcroft's effort as Missouri attorney general to prevent the state from paying hundreds of millions of dollars to desegregate schools it had never segregated in the first place. His opponents now are pulling the time-tested stunt of turning disagreement about the means into disagreement about the ends.

Outrage 3: Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said that Judge White "faced an embarrassment and a humiliation on the floor of the Senate which did not have to happen. If there was a heartfelt belief by the senators from Missouri that he should not have been a federal district judge, it should never have reached that point in time." In other words, Sens. Ashcroft and Kit Bond should have exercised their prerogative as "home state" senators (White was nominated to a judgeship in their state) to veto the nomination right out of the chute rather than let it progress through the confirmation process.

This jaw-dropping hypocrisy is staggering even for Democrats. Throughout the hearing, as they had ad nauseam for years, Democrats attacked Ashcroft for supposedly using tactics including "holds" to prevent nominees from moving through the confirmation process. Just one day after telling Ashcroft that he should have blocked the White nomination, Durbin complained that Ronnie White "did not receive the same fair hearing … that virtually every other judicial nominee receives." If debating Judge White's record was embarrassing, it's because he has an embarrassing record.

Outrage 4: Sens. Leahy and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Democrats would oppose Ashcroft's nomination if they applied the same standard that led Ashcroft to oppose the nomination of Bill Lann Lee to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. Leahy insisted that the "Ashcroft standard" had been nothing more than disagreement about policy positions, the same grounds on which Democrats today oppose Ashcroft's nomination.

As he explained to Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., however, Ashcroft "considered carefully whether the nominee would enforce the Supreme Court's most recent ruling on racial quotas." Ashcroft opposed the Lee nomination not because he held a different opinion about quotas, but because Mr. Lee would likely not have enforced court rulings on this subject with which he personally disagreed. Ashcroft responded to Leahy this way: "I joined with eight other Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee in opposing Bill Lee's nomination … because I had serious concerns about his willingness to enforce the Adarand decision which was a recent decision of the United States Supreme Court."

It turns out that the "Ashcroft standard" on such nominations was the same as the Leahy-Schumer-Feinstein-Kennedy standard is today, namely, that a Justice Department nominee be committed to enforcing even laws and court decisions with which he disagrees. While conservative Ashcroft's record shows he will, liberal Bill Lann Lee's record showed he would not.

Outrage 5: Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., charged that Ashcroft "organized fringe police groups to oppose the [judicial] confirmation [of Ronnie White]. John Ashcroft then recruited Kit Bond and other Republicans to vote against Judge White" in a "shameless, cheap political sabotage of a fine judge." Rep. Waters must define as "fringe" anyone who disagrees with her because there's no way the National Sheriffs Association, Missouri Sheriffs Association, and Missouri Federation of Chiefs of Police can otherwise be considered "fringe police groups." And other, apparently fringe, law enforcement groups have endorsed the Ashcroft nomination including the National District Attorneys Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and many individual chapters of the National Latino Police Officers.

Further, Ashcroft did not organize law enforcement groups to oppose the White nomination; Sheriff Kenny Jones, whose wife was murdered by a man Judge White sought to let off death row, did the organizing. And the 54 senators who opposed the White nomination examined the nominee's record and simply came to a conclusion Rep. Waters does not share.

Outrage 6: The American taxpayer heavily subsidizes Ashcroft's attackers. The Planned Parenthood Federation, for example, in 1999 received more than $27 million; American Bar Association, nearly $5 million; National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, nearly $1.7 million; National Education Association, more than $1 million; just one of the government employee unions, nearly $1 million; NAACP, more than $725,000; NOW Legal Defense & Education Fund, more than $600,000.

All told, fewer than 20 of those leftist groups soaked up nearly $45 million in 1999 alone.

Outrage 7: Ever since the Senate rejected the White nomination in October 1999, these leftists have claimed that senators voted against the nominee because of his race. Former President Bill Clinton continued this lie on Jan. 3, when he told the NAACP convention that Republicans blocked judicial nominees "because of their race." Not only is there no evidence for this, but many senators did not know Judge White's race until they were later accused of racism for voting against him. If Ashcroft based his votes on race, he would not have voted for every one of the 26 black nominees confirmed by the Senate.

Rather than the perverse drive-by innuendo that senators voted against Judge White because he was black, the real question is why senators voted for him despite having opposed the death penalty far more than his colleagues during his tenure.

Outrage 8: On Jan. 17, Sen. Durbin said that Judge White had been "pilloried" and that what happened to him "should never happen to anyone." A few days later, he and his fellow Democrats sent more than 400 written questions to Ashcroft in addition to the pounding they gave him in the hearing. These questions covered matters that had been discussed in that hearing, such as why Ashcroft voted against certain judicial nominees, or that are already a matter of public record. Such harassment is beneath the "world's greatest deliberative body" and "should never happen to anyone."

Outrage 9: Lacking the votes to defeat the Ashcroft nomination on politics alone, these leftists are urging a filibuster when the nomination reaches the Senate floor. Kennedy, who has suggested he may lead a filibuster, himself said during a 1995 filibuster against a non-Cabinet nominee that "It is wrong to filibuster this nomination, and senators who believe in fairness will not let a minority of the Senate deny [the nominee] his vote by the entire Senate. We do a disservice to [the nominee], the Senate and the Nation as a whole by prolonging this process."

Partisan hypocrisy is really ugly.

Outrage 10: These leftists are demonizing a man, not debating his qualifications. They try to make him say things they can use against him and, when he fails to take the bait, they accuse him of (Feinstein's words) undergoing "a kind of metamorphosis" or (Schumer's version) an "evolution."

The assault against Ashcroft is part of the never-ending campaign against President Bush, and his opponents will use these tactics against other nominees unless he publicly denounces them and makes this part of the Washington "way of doing business" that he has set out to change.