On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Max Sawicky wrote:
> The rap against Ashcroft seems to be shaping up as, he rejected Ronnie
> White because White is African- American. This seems to be a very weak
> line of argument. Maybe that's just the media vulgarization of the
> case.
>
> Ashcroft's racism derives from his philosophical views on all
> policies relating to race, not to his decision on White. he is
> reported to have voted to confirm most black judges who have come up
> for confirmation (26 of 28). If this is true, he can't be faulted on
> racial grounds for rejecting White.
I'm not sure I agree with you here, Max. The Ronnie White case, as presented, seems rhetorically quite powerful. In the Senate it resonates because it is so extremely rare for the Senate to reject a candidate who has already passed all the other hoops -- it hasn't happened in 20 years. Many Senators were embarassed at the time, and it's not bad to remind them again, especially since all of Ashcroft's charges seem to be baseless. And in the population at large, the spectre of a man who played by the rules and excelled and then was unfairly laid low by slander plays well almost everywhere.
Statistically you might be right. But this isn't a statistical argument. It's like innocents and the death penalty -- statistically they're rare, and it logically it doesn't tackle the real issue, which is that it's wrong even if they're guilty. But rhetorically it's brilliant, because it makes almost everybody instantly queasy about the whole system and thus throws its defenders on the defensive.
Attached is an editorial from today's Times that seems to me to make the Ronnie White story sound like quite a good line of attack.
Michael
January 4, 2001
IN AMERICA
Fairness for Whom?
By BOB HERBERT
W e 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.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company