WASHINGTON, Jan. 26 — John Ashcroft submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee today hundreds of written responses to questions as the battle over his nomination for attorney general was swiftly moving to a conclusion, and possibly a vote next week.

Mr. Ashcroft, who was criticized by gay rights groups when he was a Republican senator from Missouri and voted in committee against the appointment of James C. Hormel to be ambassador to Luxembourg in 1997, repeated an earlier statement about Mr. Hormel.

Mr. Ashcroft said that Mr. Hormel, who is openly gay, could not effectively represent the United States in Luxembourg, a nation that Mr. Ashcroft said was Europe's "most Roman Catholic country."

Most of Mr. Ashcroft's answers to the questions yielded little fresh insight into his thinking about contentious social issues that were fiercely debated in his confirmation hearings, like race, abortion and gun control. In response to many questions, Mr. Ashcroft said only that he would enforce the country's laws, even those he opposed.

Today, the top Democratic senator on the Judiciary Committee, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, expressed disappointment over Mr. Ashcroft's written responses.

"The answers are surprisingly unresponsive and often inconsistent with the hearing record and with Senator Ashcroft's own record," Mr. Leahy said in a statement.

Republicans said the questions had been completely and quickly answered.

Senate Republicans have been hoping to have the Ashcroft nomination voted on by the full Senate by Thursday. The current plan is for the Judiciary Committee to vote on Wednesday. After that, Republicans want to move the nomination immediately to the Senate floor for what is expected to be a long debate. Republican staff aides said they wanted the process over before a Republican retreat scheduled to begin at noon on Friday. In addition, they said they wanted to end the deliberations over Mr. Ashcroft's appointment to spare him further attacks.

Asked about the appointment of Mr. Hormel, who in 1998 was named by President Bill Clinton to the ambassadorial post in a maneuver that bypassed Congress, Mr. Ashcroft replied, "Based on the totality of Mr. Hormel's record of public positions and advocacy, I did not believe he would effectively represent the United States in Luxembourg, the most Roman Catholic country in all of Europe."

Mr. Ashcroft also repeated testimony he gave at last week's confirmation hearings, in which he said he would not seek to undermine Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that declared a woman's constitutional right to abortion. In his written answer, Mr. Ashcroft said he regarded the legal issue as settled "through the passage of time and reaffirmation by the Supreme Court."

January 20, 2001

The New York Times

JOURNAL

Presidents come and go, but a Washington cliché is forever. Today we'll be lectured repeatedly on the poignancy of a president's exit (not that he's actually going anywhere), the promise of a new president's arrival, and on the glory of our Republic. We'll be reminded that there are no tanks in the streets when America changes leaders — only cheesy floats and aural assault weapons in the guise of high school bands.

All true, and yet at this inaugural more than any other in any American's lifetime there is a cognitive dissonance between the patriotic sentiment and the reality. More Americans voted for the candidate who lost the election than the one who won. The Washington Post/ABC News poll says that only 41 percent believe the winner "has a mandate to carry out the agenda" of his campaign. Even before the Florida fracas, the country's black population rejected the Republican candidate (who assiduously tried to attract black voters) by a larger margin than any since Barry Goldwater (who had voted against the Civil Rights Act). And now come calamities ignored in a campaign that dithered about prescription drugs, tax cuts and schools: an energy meltdown in the nation's biggest state, and a possible economic downturn.

George W. Bush seems like an earnest man. When he says he has come to Washington to "change the tone" and "unite, not divide," I don't doubt his sincerity. But so far his actions are those of another entitled boomer who is utterly blind to his own faults. He narcissistically believes things to be so (and his intentions pure) because he says they are.

Change the tone? As Clinton-Gore raised $33 million largely from their corporate masters for their first inaugural, so Bush-Cheney have solicited $35 million from, among others, the securities firms that want to get their hands on your privatized Social Security retirement accounts and the pharmaceutical companies that want to protect the prices of prescription drugs. And already foreign money is making its entrance — in the form of a legal but unsavory $100,000 contribution from the deputy prime minister of Lebanon, channeled through his son.

Now comes the news — reported by the columnist Robert Novak — that John Huang, the convicted Clinton- Gore fund-raiser, repeatedly took the Fifth Amendment in November when questioned in court about his alleged fiscal ties to Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell, the No. 1 opponent of the John McCain crusade for campaign finance reform that Mr. Bush has yet to credibly embrace. (Mr. McConnell is also the husband of Mr. Bush's latest labor secretary-designate, Elaine Chao.)

Change the tone? Hard as it is to imagine that anyone could choose an attorney general as polarizing as the last, Mr. Bush has outdone himself. With a single cabinet pick he has reproduced the rancor that attended the full Clinton legal troika of Reno, Hubbell & Foster.

There's been much debate about whether John Ashcroft is a racist — a hard case to make against a man whose history of playing the race card to pander to voters is balanced by his record of black judicial appointments. But there has not been nearly enough debate about whether our incipient chief legal officer has lied under oath to the Senate.

Perhaps his seeming fudging and reversals of his previous stands on Roe v. Wade and gun control can be rationalized as clever lawyerese. Perhaps some of his evasions can be dismissed as a politician's typical little white lies — and I do mean white — such as when he denies he knew that a magazine he favored with an interview, Southern Partisan, espoused the slaveholding views of Southern partisans. But it took a bolder kind of dissembling to contradict his own paper trail in public office. After he swore that the state of Missouri "had been found guilty of no wrong" in a landmark St. Louis desegregation case and that "both as attorney general and as governor" of the state he had followed "all" court orders in the matter, The Washington Post needed only a day to report the truth: A federal district judge in fact ruled that the state was a "primary constitutional wrongdoer" in the matter and threatened to hold Mr. Ashcroft in contempt for his "continual delay and failure to comply" with court orders.

Mr. Ashcroft may have left even more land mines in his testimony about the businessman, philanthropist and former law school official James Hormel, the Clinton ambassador to Luxembourg whose nomination he had fought. Asked by Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary chairman, if he had opposed Mr. Hormel because Mr. Hormel is gay, Mr. Ashcroft answered, "I did not." Then why did he oppose Mr. Hormel? "Well, frankly, I had known Mr. Hormel for a long time. He had recruited me, when I was a student in college, to go to the University of Chicago Law School," Mr. Ashcroft testified, before adding a cryptic answer he would repeat two times as Mr. Leahy pressed him: "I made a judgment that it would be ill advised to make him ambassador based on the totality of the record."

The implication of this creepy testimony is that Mr. Ashcroft, having known the 68-year-old Mr. Hormel for decades, had some goods on him. The use of the word "recruit" by Mr. Ashcroft also had a loaded connotation in context, since it's common for those on the religious right who argue (as Mr. Ashcroft does) that sexual orientation is a choice to accuse homosexuals of "recruiting" the young.

No senator followed up Mr. Ashcroft's testimony about Mr. Hormel, who, unlike another subject of an Ashcroft character assassination, Judge Ronnie White, was not invited to testify at the hearings. I located Mr. Hormel by phone in Washington, where he had traveled for final meetings at the State Department after concluding his service in Luxembourg. He strongly disputed Mr. Ashcroft's version of events.

"I don't recall ever recruiting anybody for the University of Chicago," Mr. Hormel said in our conversation Wednesday night. As an assistant dean involved with admissions, he says, he might have met Mr. Ashcroft in passing while touring campuses to give talks to prospective law school applicants, or in later office visits about grades or curriculum. But, Mr. Hormel quickly adds, he doesn't recall "a single conversation with John Ashcroft." Nor has Mr. Hormel seen him in the three decades since; Mr. Ashcroft didn't have the courtesy to respond to repeated requests for a meeting during Mr. Hormel's own confirmation process and didn't bother to attend Mr. Hormel's hearing before opposing him.

"I think he made insinuations which would lead people to have a complete misunderstanding of my very limited relationship with him," Mr. Hormel says. "I fear that there was an inference he created that he knew me and based on that knowledge he came to the conclusion I wasn't fit to become an ambassador. I find that very disturbing. He kept repeating the phrase `the totality of the record.' I don't know what record he's talking about. I don't know of anything I've ever done that's been called unethical." The record that Mr. Ashcroft so casually smeared includes an appointment to the U.N. in 1996 that was confirmed by the Foreign Relations Committee on which Mr. Ashcroft then sat.

Since Mr. Bush could easily have avoided the divisiveness of the Ashcroft choice by picking an equally conservative attorney general with less baggage, some of his opponents will start calling him "stupid" again. That seems unfair. Mr. Bush's real problem is arrogance — he thinks we are stupid. He thinks that if he vouches incessantly for the "good heart" of a John Ashcroft, that settles it. It hasn't; polls showed an even split on the nomination well before the hearings. He thinks that if he fills the stage with black faces at a white convention and poses incessantly with black schoolkids and talks about being the "inclusive" president "of everybody," he'll persuade minority voters he's compassionate. He hasn't.

George W. Bush likes to boast that he doesn't watch TV. He didn't even tune in as the nation's highest court debated his fate, leaving his princely retainers to bring him bulletins. Maybe it's time for him to start listening; he might even learn why so many Americans aren't taking his word for John Ashcroft's "heart." I don't doubt that our new president will give a poetic Inaugural Address today, but if he remains out of touch with the country, he will not be able to govern tomorrow.

Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings on John Ashcroft
January 16, 2001
Transcript by CNN

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0101/16/se.06.html

ASHCROFT: [Dr. Satcher] lobbied Congress to continue an anonymous study testing newborn infants' blood for the AIDS virus, without informing the mother if the test was positive. Now, I have real problems with a situation where someone wants to be the surgeon general of the United States, wants to learn about whether or not there's AIDS present in a medical situation, and not tell the people involved about the AIDS virus.

This is a matter of deep concern to me. The idea of sending fatally infected babies home with their unwitting mothers, even after a treatment had been identified for AIDS, to me was an idea that was unacceptable for an individual who wanted to be the leader in terms of the medical community and a role model in the United States. It was on those grounds that I made the decision.

CNN's Crossfire, January 16, 2001
Bill Press Exchange with Senator Arlen Specter

PRESS: Senator Specter, Senator Ashcroft was also asked today, in addition to Bill Lann Lee, about his opposition to David Satcher as attorney general. I was surprised, he made a very serious charge. He said he voted against him because General Satcher was guilty ... of sending AIDS infected babies home without telling their mothers... Now, I checked today after the hearing. That program was not begun by David Satcher. It was actually done under Ronald Reagan in 1988 to test the spread of AIDS in this country, and it was ended by Doctor Satcher in 1995, two years before he was nominated as surgeon general. Again, wasn't that a bogus, and unfair charge on Ashcroft's part?

SPECTER: Well, Bill, nobody challenged him at the hearing. John Ashcroft...

PRESS: I am now.

SPECTER: Well, where is John Ashcroft? Let's see if he can respond to it. The issue was raised about Doctor Satcher's nomination, and Senator Ashcroft gave very specific reasons, saying that on this testing, if they found the child was infected with AIDS, they did not tell the parents. And he had very specific reasons that what -- at least according to his representation -- and I don't know if he was right, wrong, or indifferent. But I do know Doctor Satcher's nomination was brought up by a questioner, and Ashcroft answered, and that was the end of it.

PRESS: But here's what I find troubling, is -- and by the way, at the time, Bill Frist, the only... physician in the Senate, and a Republican, said that what Doctor Satcher did was ethically correct, that the charges were bogus, and it was pure politics, had nothing to do with the real issue. And so, you get with David Satcher, and with Ronnie White, and with Bill Lann Lee -- you always get these far-reaching reasons that Ashcroft comes up with for opposing some minority nominee. Doesn't that -- isn't that troubling?

OPENING ARGUMENT: A character assassin should not be Attorney General

By Stuart Taylor Jr., National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Jan. 12, 2001

Former Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., is an able and accomplished man who won the respect of many Senate colleagues in both parties. But he is unfit to be Attorney General. The reason is that during an important debate on a sensitive matter, then-Sen. Ashcroft abused the power of his office by descending to demagoguery, dishonesty, and character assassination.

The debate was over President Clinton's nomination of Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ronnie White to become a federal district judge. Although too liberal to be picked by a Republican President, White had shown himself to be an honest, skilled, and sometimes eloquent jurist, well within the moderate mainstream. But Ashcroft, leaning hard on Republican Senators who would otherwise have voted to confirm, engineered a 54-45 party-line vote on Oct. 5, 1999, to reject White's nomination. Worse, Ashcroft claimed on the Senate floor that Judge White had "a serious bias against... the death penalty"; that he was "pro-criminal and activist, [and would] push law in a pro-criminal direction"; and that he had "a tremendous bent toward criminal activity." The first statement was a wild exaggeration. The second was a demagogic distortion. The third was a malicious smear.

Ashcroft is not the man to head the Justice Department. The job is vested with such vast authority over the lives of people great and small, and such symbolic importance, that the minimum qualifications should include honesty, fair-mindedness, and judicious self-restraint in the exercise of power. Every new President is entitled to Senate deference in choosing his Cabinet, even when the nominee's policy views draw bitter liberal or conservative opposition. (Linda Chavez might have become a distinguished Labor Secretary but for her sad mistake of failing to tell Bush vetters up front what they needed to know about her illegal-immigrant issue.) But no President is entitled to put a character assassin in charge of law enforcement.

All this would be true even if Judge White were white, if Ashcroft had not expressed such fondness for the Confederacy, if race were not an issue, and if Ashcroft were in tune with the Bush pledge to be a uniter, not a divider. But White is black. The racial context makes Ashcroft's orchestration of a floor vote against a judicial nominee, the first since 1987 (when Robert H. Bork's Supreme Court nomination went down), all the more deplorable. And Ashcroft's confrontational advocacy of absolutist views makes him a divider, not a uniter.

This is not to endorse the unfounded and tiresomely irresponsible suggestions by some liberal critics that Ashcroft's attacks on Judge White were motivated by racial bias or hostility to antidiscrimination laws. Nor is it to join the claque who would fight any conservative nominee for Justice as racially insensitive and divisive. But it does appear that Ashcroft was deliberately engaging in inflammatory racial politics -- in part to boost his own 2000 re-election prospects by hanging the "pro-criminal" label both on Judge White and on then-Gov. Mel Carnahan, who had appointed White and was gunning for Ashcroft's Senate seat. Ashcroft must have known that accusing a black judge (falsely) of being "pro-criminal" and of "a tremendous bent toward criminal activity" would stir the worst instincts of those voters who stereotype criminality as black.

One result of Ashcroft's reckless roiling of racial tensions is that he would have especially low credibility with the vast majority of African-Americans, including moderates and conservatives who eschew the race-baiting rhetoric of victimologists such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Indeed, people who hope to see the Justice Department move away from its long-standing advocacy of race-based affirmative action preferences (as I do) should wonder: Can John Ashcroft be a credible advocate of making the law more colorblind? I doubt it.

Deceptive rhetoric aside, is Ronnie White soft on crime? Not unless one equates measured concern for civil liberties with softness. According to Justice Department numbers, White, as of October 1999, had voted to uphold 41 (almost 70 percent) of the 59 death sentences he had reviewed. He voted to reverse the other 18, including 10 that were unanimously reversed and just three in which he was the only dissenter. (Some say that White reviewed 61 death sentences and voted to reverse 20.) His rate of affirmance was only marginally lower than the 75 percent to 81 percent averages of the five current Missouri Supreme Court judges whom Ashcroft himself appointed when he was governor

Ashcroft stressed that Judge White had dissented from decisions affirming death sentences four times as often as any Ashcroft-appointed colleague. True. But does this suggest that White would "push law in a pro-criminal direction," as Ashcroft said -- or that Ashcroft appointees were rubber-stamping unfair trials?

The two dissents most directly assailed by Ashcroft in fact exude moderation and care in dealing with the tension between crime-fighting and civil liberties. In a 1998 decision, the majority upheld the murder convictions and death sentence of a previously law-abiding Vietnam veteran named James Johnson, who had suddenly turned violent. He stalked and killed a sheriff, two deputies, and another sheriff's wife in a horrifying succession of shootings that erupted out of a domestic dispute. The only defense was insanity. The immediate issue was whether Johnson should get a new trial, after which he would either go back to death row or be locked up in a mental hospital.

If Johnson "was in control of his faculties when he went on this murderous rampage," Judge White wrote, "then he assuredly deserves the death sentence he was given." But the jury's consideration of the insanity defense had been skewed by an egregious blunder. Johnson's court-appointed attorney had begun by stressing that a rope-and-tin-can "perimeter" around Johnson's garage was evidence that he had been under a delusion that he was back in Vietnam, at war. This was a gift to the prosecution, which blew the back-in-Vietnam strategy to bits by showing that the police had set up the perimeter.

Both Judge White and his colleagues faulted the defense attorney (for inadequate investigation) as well as the prosecution (for leaving the defense attorney with a false impression of the facts). They differed only on whether there was a "reasonable probability" that the jury might otherwise have found Johnson insane. The majority said no. Judge White said yes. His conclusion was plausible, debatable, highly unpopular (especially among police), and (for that reason) courageous. For Ashcroft to call it "pro-criminal" was obscene.

In the second case, one Brian Kinder was sentenced to die for a heinous rape-murder. Judge White's "only basis" for voting to give Kinder a new trial, Ashcroft claimed, was that the trial judge had said he was "opposed to affirmative action." False. In fact, Judge White's dissent termed that comment (made in a campaign press release) "irrelevant to the issue of bias." Instead he stressed another, "indefensibly racist" assertion in which the trial judge had contrasted "minorities" with "hard-working taxpayers." This cast grave doubt on the impartiality of a judge who was to try a black man for murder in just six days, Judge White concluded. His dissent was far more candid and convincing than the majority opinion.

Pro-criminal? Some police groups, including 77 of Missouri's 114 sheriffs, criticized Judge White's record. But other law enforcement officials praised him as a good judge and "an upright, fine individual," in the words of Carl Wolf, president of the Missouri Police Chiefs Association.

The smearing of Judge White makes the many testimonials to Ashcroft's integrity ring a bit hollow. But quite apart from that episode, it was most unwise for President-elect Bush to choose Ashcroft for Attorney General. The reason is that Ashcroft is an uncompromising absolutist with a bellicose approach to issues ranging from gay rights and gun control to abortion (which would be a crime, if Ashcroft had his way, even in cases of rape and incest). He is also dead wrong (in my view) on major issues, including his aggressive push to cram even more nonviolent, small-time offenders who pose no threat to society into our prison-industrial complex, which has already mushroomed to 2 million inmates.

What would I be saying if it were President-elect Al Gore trying to put the Justice Department under (say) Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. -- who smeared another judicial nominee (in 1987) by saying: "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids... "

I would be saying that a character assassin should not be Attorney General. How about you?