Fairness for Whom?
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/04/opinion/04HERB.html
January 4, 2001
IN AMERICA
By BOB HERBERT
We keep hearing that George W. Bush's choice for attorney
general, John Ashcroft, is a man of honor, a stalwart when it comes to matters
of principle and integrity. Former Senate colleagues are frequently quoted as
saying that while they disagree with his ultra-conservative political views,
they consider him to be a trustworthy, fair-minded individual.
Spare me. The allegedly upright Mr. Ashcroft revealed himself as a
shameless and deliberately destructive liar in 1999 when, as the junior senator
from Missouri, he launched a malicious attack against a genuinely honorable man,
Ronnie White, who had been nominated by the president to a federal district
court seat.
Justice White was a distinguished jurist and the first black member of the
Missouri Supreme Court. Mr. Ashcroft, a right-wing zealot with a fondness for
the old Confederacy, could not abide his elevation to the federal bench. But
there were no legitimate reasons to oppose Justice White's confirmation by the
Senate. So Mr. Ashcroft reached into the gutter and scooped up a few handfuls of
calumny to throw at the nominee.
He declared that Justice White was soft on crime. Worse, he was
"pro-criminal." The judge's record, according to Mr. Ashcroft, showed
"a tremendous bent toward criminal activity." As for the death
penalty, that all-important criminal justice barometer well, in Mr.
Ashcroft's view, the nominee was beyond the pale. He said that Ronnie White was
the most anti-death-penalty judge on the State Supreme Court.
Listen closely: None of this was true. But by the time Mr. Ashcroft
finished painting his false portrait of Justice White, his Republican colleagues
had fallen into line and were distributing a memo that described the nominee as
"notorious among law enforcement officers in his home state of Missouri for
his decisions favoring murderers, rapists, drug dealers and other heinous
criminals."
This was a sick episode. Justice White was no friend of criminals. And a
look at the record would have shown that even when it came to the death penalty
he voted to uphold capital sentences in 70 percent of the cases that came before
him. There were times when he voted (mostly with the majority) to reverse
capital sentences because of procedural errors. But as my colleague Anthony
Lewis pointed out last week, judges appointed by Mr. Ashcroft when he was
governor of Missouri voted as often as Justice White in some cases,
more often to reverse capital sentences.
But the damage was done. Mr. Ashcroft's unscrupulous, mean-spirited attack
succeeded in derailing the nomination of a fine judge. The confirmation of
Justice White was defeated by Republicans in a party-line vote. The Alliance for
Justice, which monitors judicial selections, noted that it was the first time in
almost half a century that the full Senate had voted down a district court
nominee.
The Times, in an editorial, said the Republicans had reached "a new
low" in the judicial confirmation process. The headline on the editorial
was "A Sad Judicial Mugging."
So much for the fair-minded Mr. Ashcroft.
A Republican senator, who asked not to be identified, told me this week
that he could not justify Mr. Ashcroft's treatment of Ronnie White, but that it
would be wrong to suggest that the attack on his nomination was racially
motivated.
That may or may not be so. It would be easier to believe if Mr. Ashcroft
did not have such a dismal record on matters related to race. As Missouri's
attorney general he was opposed to even a voluntary plan to desegregate schools
in metropolitan St. Louis. Just last year he accepted an honorary degree from
Bob Jones University, a school that is notorious for its racial and religious
intolerance. And a couple of years ago, Mr. Ashcroft gave a friendly interview
to Southern Partisan magazine, praising it for helping to "set the record
straight" about issues related to the Civil War.
Southern Partisan just happens to be a rabid neo-Confederate publication
that ritually denounces Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and other
champions of freedom and tolerance in America.
This is the man George W. Bush has carefully chosen to be the highest law
enforcement officer in the nation. That silence that you hear is the sound of
black Americans not celebrating.
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