The Wrong Choice for Justice

When he served as Missouri's attorney general in the 1980s, Ashcroft persuaded the Reagan Administration to oppose school-desegregation plans in St. Louis, then used the issue to win the governorship in 1984. Since his election to the Senate in 1994, Ashcroft has consistently appealed to the right wing of his party, even when his approach risked appearing racist. He fought unsuccessfully against the confirmation of David Satcher, a distinguished black physician, as surgeon general, because Satcher opposes a ban on late-term abortions. In 1998 Ashcroft told the neo-segregationist magazine Southern Partisan that Confederate war heroes were "patriots." In 1999 he accepted an honorary degree from South Carolina's Bob Jones University, which hadn't yet dropped its ridiculous ban on interracial dating.

Most disturbing of all, as Ashcroft was gearing up a short-lived campaign for the White House last year, he verbally attacked Missouri Supreme Court Justice Ronnie White, an African American whom Bill Clinton has appointed to the federal bench, for supposedly being "pro-criminal" and soft on capital punishment. The charge was outright slander. White had voted to uphold the death sentence in 41 of the 59 cases that came before him, roughly the same proportion as Ashcroft's court appointees when he was Governor. No wonder Gordon Baum, leader of white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, in 1999 included Ashcroft along with Pat Buchanan in the circle of politicians he'd like to see in the White House.

Does Baum know something Bush doesn't? Can Ashcroft be trusted to oversee the investigation of alleged voting-rights abuses in Florida, which many blacks believe disenfranchised them and delivered the presidency unfairly to Bush? This is one nomination that, pardon the pun, should be consigned to the Ashcroft of history.