Senate confirmation hearings on President-elect George W. Bush’s most contentious Cabinet choice began Tuesday with Atty. Gen.-designate John Ashcroft offering assurances he would enforce even the laws he finds morally objectionable.
Democratic senators intensely questioned the nominee on his deeply conservative record, initially focusing on racially sensitive concerns such as Ashcroft’s vigorous legal challenge to a St. Louis school desegregation plan during the 1980s.
They also raised his passionate and long-standing advocacy for the causes of the religious right, views that some Democratic critics suggest would cloud his judgment and prevent him from even-handed enforcement of laws.
In response, Ashcroft, the strictly observant son of a Pentecostal preacher, drew on the same faith he cites as the source for positions such as his steadfast opposition to abortion rights and gay rights.
“As a man of faith, I take my word and my integrity seriously. So, when I swear to uphold the law, I will keep my oath, so help me God,” he told senators, raising his right hand.
Ashcroft said he accepted Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal nationwide, as “the settled law of the land” and he committed himself to enforcing “clear and settled law.”
The nomination of Ashcroft, a Republican former Missouri senator, as U.S. attorney general has galvanized political activists on the left and right. Coalitions of liberal and conservative organizations have aired radio advertisements attacking and defending his nomination in key states.
Conservatives rallied Tuesday outside the Senate office building as the hearings started. Earlier in the day, feminist groups supporting the right to abortion warned Democratic senators they would pay a price at the polls in their next elections if they did not oppose Ashcroft’s confirmation.
Ashcroft would be the most prominent member of the incoming Bush administration drawn from the ranks of Christian conservatives. And the office of attorney general would place him in the Cabinet position generally considered to have the greatest influence over domestic social policy.
The furor over Ashcroft also could prove an early test of the evenly divided Senate’s ability to handle contentious matters.
Still, conservatives remain cautiously confident Ashcroft will be confirmed, and nothing on the opening day of his Senate hearings detracted from their optimism, although Democrats previewed some tough lines of questioning.
Republican senators said he was one of the most qualified candidates ever to be nominated as attorney general, citing his two terms as Missouri’s elected state attorney general, two terms as the state’s governor and one term in the U.S. Senate.
“I feel a great sense of comfort and a newfound security in your nomination to be our nation’s chief law-enforcement officer,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).
Touching on federal laws banning violence or intimidation of women seeking abortion services, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) mused that, in allocating federal law-enforcement resources, “how much will go to the clinics where you think murder is being committed?”
Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) homed in on Ashcroft’s opposition while Missouri state attorney general to a voluntary plan to desegregate schools in the St. Louis area, citing a federal judge’s opinion criticizing Ashcroft’s tactics as obstructionist.
“Where in your priorities were the rights and the interests of those black students who were trying to get a decent education?” Kennedy asked.
The plan called for black students from the city to be given the choice to attend predominantly white schools in St. Louis suburbs while white students were given the opportunity to attend magnet schools within the city.
But Ashcroft said the judge’s criticism was “unfair,” and the nominee explained he was defending the state of Missouri from hundreds of millions of dollars in financial liability. Although the students and municipalities involved voluntarily accepted the plan, much of the cost was shifted onto the state of Missouri because of the ruling, he said.
Kennedy also questioned Ashcroft’s veto, while he was Missouri governor, of legislation designed to raise voter registration in St. Louis, with its large concentration of African-American residents. The legislation ordered the city’s election board, which was appointed by Ashcroft, to allow volunteers from non-partisan groups to register voters, as was the practice elsewhere in the state.
“The only difference is the city is poor, mainly minority and votes Democratic,” Kennedy charged.
Ashcroft countered with concerns about voter fraud and cited the opposition of the president of the city’s Board of Aldermen, who he noted was a Democrat.
“I am pleased to say all Americans should have the opportunity to vote. And I am committed to the integrity of the ballot box,” Ashcroft said.
Anticipating sensitive questions on racial issues, Ashcroft devoted a lengthy section of his opening statement to a commitment to minority rights. The only modern attorney general he cited in his introduction was Robert F. Kennedy, an unusual choice for a Republican but a model he cited for “the courage to surmount America’s historic racial intolerance.”
Ashcroft said he would work vigorously against racial profiling by police, a practice he said “must not stand.”
Answering criticism of his conservative social positions, Ashcroft specifically committed to enforcing federal laws protecting women’s access to abortion clinics. He also cited examples when he, as Missouri’s attorney general, had enforced laws he personally opposed, including an opinion he rendered refusing anti-abortion groups access to confidential abortion records.
Despite some pointed exchanges, the clubby deference the Senate grants past members in confirmation hearings was in evidence, with Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) fondly remembering the hospitality Ashcroft offered him when Brownback’s apartment building burned, and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) reminiscing about a car ride Ashcroft gave him.
Without committing himself, Feingold suggested he was leaning toward giving Ashcroft his support. He said philosophical differences should not be sufficient to derail a nomination, citing “the political golden rule. … Do unto the Republicans as we would have the Republicans do unto us.”
Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.) added, “Let me say to my colleagues it is painful, [but] if I can vote for Janet Reno, you can vote for John Ashcroft.”
Still, some Democrats displayed resentment at the leading role Ashcroft played as a senator in blocking the Clinton administration’s judicial and executive appointments.
Among the most controversial was Ashcroft’s role in spearheading opposition to federal judicial nominee Ronnie White, an African-American Missouri Supreme Court justice whom Ashcroft branded as “pro-criminal” and anti-death penalty.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called Ashcroft’s characterization a “gross distortion” of White’s record. And, in his opening statement, Durbin told of walking up to White at a funeral to personally apologize for White’s “embarrassment and humiliation on the Senate floor.”
Democrats plan to call White as a witness later in the week.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) also raised Ashcroft’s opposition to the nomination of Bill Lann Lee as assistant attorney general for civil rights.
Ashcroft said he opposed Lee because of differences over the interpretation of a Supreme Court decision placing restrictions on minority set-aside programs in federal contracts.
In a news conference Tuesday, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said the Bush camp welcomed the start of the hearings because they will allow Ashcroft’s qualifications to emerge. Fleischer sought to marginalize the organizations fighting Ashcroft, calling them “liberal special interest groups” and suggesting that they, not Ashcroft, are out of step with the public.
Fleischer predicted that after Ashcroft is confirmed, “those who oppose him will find themselves as the new partisans on the block. They’ll be the ones who are now outside the mainstream.”
Bush spoke to Ashcroft last week, assuring the former senator he is the right man for the job and will be confirmed. Bush has not called senators to lobby on Ashcroft’s behalf, though he may do so after this week’s hearings if necessary.
The Bush team has appeared startled at times by the quickness and ferocity of liberal attacks on Ashcroft and other Bush nominees, but Fleischer insisted Bush is not surprised by the furor over Ashcroft. Fleischer portrayed the tempest as exactly the sort of Washington-style partisanship Bush had decried during the presidential campaign.
