Unrepentant South mounts new assault on Washington 

The new President will be sworn in this week amid a storm over his choice of Attorney-General, reports
Ed Vulliamy in New York

Guardian Unlimited
Special report: George W Bush's America 
Sunday January 14, 2001 

A bitter political fight is marking the days before President-elect George W Bush's assumption of office on Thursday and will grow into the defining issue of the hand-over to the Republicans.  Bush's determination to appoint John Ashcroft, an extreme right-winger, as his Attorney-General is arousing mounting objections within the Democratic Party and US society. Ashcroft has hardline views against abortion, even in rape and incest cases. He is against gun control and led the impeachment of President Clinton. 

He comes second in the vote score card of the John Birch Society. He calls the National Endowment for the Arts 'communist-style central planning'. In his native Missouri - where voters were so unhappy with his views that he lost his Senate seat in November to Democrat Mel Carnahan, who had died in a plane crash the month before - he blocked the nomination of a black judge to the federal bench and hankers for the Confederacy's values. 

The Senate must ratify the appointment and the Republican leadership is mobilising its whip. The Democrats are debating whether to go to war now or later.  Meanwhile, a group called 'Americans for the Bush Cabinet' is being formed by David Keene of the American Conservative Union, with the aim of combating opposition to Ashcroft and other controversial appointments. 'Everyone knows the campaign isn't over,' says Keene. 'There's no honeymoon for Bush and no let-up by the Democrats - it's just total political war.' 

Beyond Capitol Hill, there are hosannas of joy from such figures as preacher Jerry Falwell, the National Rifle Association's Charlton Heston and Pat Robertson - Ashcroft's long-time friend and leader of the right-wing Christian Coalition, who plans to deliver telephone messages to half a million Americans this weekend, urging support. But there is a chorus of outrage from civil rights and ethnic minority leaders, women's and gay groups, other liberal activists and municipal boards of aldermen. 

The battle echoes in opposing newspapers, the New York Times stating strong reservations in an unusually long opinion on Friday. Even Ashcroft's local paper, the St Louis Post-Dispatch, urged the Senate to investigate his opposition 'to civil rights, women's rights, abortion rights, and to judicial nominees with whom he disagrees'.  As US Attorney-General, Ashcroft - from a
Christian fundamentalist background which forbade alcohol and even dancing  will be the nation's chief enforcer of federal law, overseeing agencies such as the FBI and immigration services, and responsible for the Washington government end of the delicate balance between federal and state power. Such occasions often involve the enforcement of civil rights law, equality laws and laws governing 'hate crimes' targeted against ethnic minorities, women and gays. 

Such cases of corrective federal law were typified by the jailing of four policemen acquitted of murdering Rodney King in California. Because of diligent work by prosecutors on the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, the officers were convicted of abusing King's civil rights - a federal felony.  Now the Civil Rights Division fears for its
existence, and the civil rights movement and women's groups are worried about Ashcroft's commitment to enforcing such legislation in defiance of his own strongly held beliefs. As a senator, he has many times opposed the existence of the very federal hate crimes he must enforce. 

'John Ashcroft is the antithesis of the person required to lead the Justice Department,' says Ralph Neas, president of the civil rights watchdog People for the American Way. 'With the possible exception of Jesse Helms, I do not believethat anyone has a more abysmal record on civil rights and civil liberties.' Ashcroft has been a béte noire for the women's movement since 1978, when, as attorney-general in Missouri, he filed a lawsuit to stop actions by the National Organisation of Women against the state's failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. More immediate concerns are for the right to abortion. In 1988 Ashcroft co-sponsored a Bill to ban all abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. When asked on television what 'one law' he would pass if he could, he replied: 'Outlaw abortion.' 

However, he is now bound to defend and enforce the historic Roe v Wade Supreme Court ruling that gave women the right to legal and safe abortion, and that his Bill sought to overturn. Violence against doctors and women at abortion clinics, including murder, has become a crisis and it is up to the Justice Department to act against criminals who single outabortion clinics. 

The anti-gun lobby is also wary: the two main gun control organisations, the Violence Policy Center and Handgun Control, last week came out strongly against the appointment of Ashcroft, who opposes all gun control and received generous support from the National Rifle Association. 

The signals that Ashcroft is fundamentally opposed to the very notion of federal authority are to be found in an interview in a neo-Confederate magazine, Southern Partisan, which has carried articles praising the Ku Klux Klan and deploring the 'dissipation' of the nation's genetic pool by blacks and Hispanics.  Ashcroft praised the magazine as one which 'helps set the record straight' and argued for the legacy of 'Southern Patriots' Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson and the Confederacy's racist president, Jefferson Davis.  Ashcroft says: 'Traditionalists have got to do more - I've go to do more - we've all got to stand up and speak... or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honour to some perverted agenda.' The interview detonated a rebellion by boards of aldermen across Missouri, demanding a retraction that never came. 

In 1984, as Missouri attorney-general, Ashcroft intervened in a lawsuit seeking to force schools in Kansas City racially to desegregate. The suit alleged discrimination, but Ashcroft dismissed it.  Five years later Ashcroft was appointed by Bush's father, then President, to a panel on social gaps which concluded the US was not doing enough for equal opportunity. There was one dissenter - Ashcroft, a lifelong opponent of affirmative action. Two years ago there were further racial tensions when Ashcroft accepted an honorary degree from the infamous Bob Jones University in North Carolina, which lost its educational tax status for banning interracial dating and calling the Catholic Church a 'Satanic cult'. However, the text of his acceptance speech, released on Friday, contained nothing to embarrass him: it was an assertion that American public life was based on Christian and 'eternal' rather than civil or temporal principles. 

But the Post-Dispatch says that he 'built a career out of opposing African-Americans for public office'. In the most notorious example he helped block the appointment to the federal bench of Judge Ronnie White, who is likely to give evidence to the Senate ratification hearings.  Ashcroft argued against White's appointment on the grounds that he was 'pro-criminal'. He cited a single opinion the judge had written in 1998 - a dissenting view against a death sentence where the convicted man had had an inadequate defence. 

But there are two convicted criminals to whom Ashcroft - acting out of character - has shown sympathy. One was his nephew, Alex Ashcroft, who managed to avoid jail having been convicted of growing some 60 cannabis plants in 1992, an offence which usually carries a prison sentence. Ashcroft also helped Charles Sell, a dentist indicted on charges of conspiracy to murder an FBI agent and a federal witness, who is a member of a white supremacist group. 

Bush's troubles are not confined to Ashcroft. His choice as Interior Secretary, Gale Norton, 46, a former attorney-general of Colorado, has criticised environmental laws for which, as steward of 500 million acres of federal land and many endangered species, she will be responsible. She, too, is a committed advocate of ' states' rights', and consistently favoured local business interests over environmental concerns.  Last week the controversy deepened with the emergence of a 1996 speech in which she likened her struggle against government to that of the Confederacy, and said that America had 'lost too much' when the South was defeated. 

Norton is at the centre of another storm, over a paint company - NI Industries - for which she was a lobbyist. The company is being sued by New York City and a number of citizens over a product from which children in the Bronx allegedly suffered lead poisoning. In her lobbyist filing for the Senate's ratification of her post, Norton said she had handled lead paint issues' for the company.