From: Arthur Hickman 
Subject: SNET: Fw: [CCNN] Top 10 Democrat Lies about John Ashcroft
Date: 28 Jan 2001 14:21:18 -0500
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From: Howard Rothenburg 
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Date: Saturday, January 27, 2001 11:55 PM
Subject: [CCNN] Top 10 Democrat Lies about John Ashcroft



Outrage Over Ashcroft Hearings
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=21470


By Thomas L. Jipping

The attack on Sen. John Ashcroft's nomination to be U.S. attorney general
has been hysterical and sometimes incomprehensible. It's not even really
about him. His leftist opponents are simply in denial about the presidential
election outcome, refuse to accept conservative ideas as legitimate and are
focus-grouping assault tactics in preparation for the next Supreme Court
nomination. Since too many outrages vie for any top-10 list, here are 10 of
the worst.

Outrage 1: Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., claimed that "on battles over
executive branch or judicial nominees, Senator Ashcroft was not just in the
minority of the United States Senate, but in a minority among Republicans in
the Senate." This public relations effort to paint Ashcroft as an extremist
fringe-dweller just isn't true.

Sen. Ashcroft voted against 12 of the 245 judicial nominees considered
during his tenure, less than 5 percent. One of them -- Missouri Supreme
Court Judge Ronnie White, nominated to the U.S. District Court -- was
defeated, leaving Leahy the one in the minority. The nominees Ashcroft
opposed received an average of 32 no votes, the large majority of
Republicans, compared to an average of 17 no votes against all opposed
nominees. And on other controversial executive branch nominees, Ashcroft was
one of 35 senators (64 percent of Republicans) to vote against the
nomination of David Satcher to be U.S. surgeon general and one of 43
senators (81 percent of Republicans) to vote against Henry Foster for the
same position. Even lawyers ought to handle simple math. Does it sound too
stupid to say that a majority of Republicans is not "a minority of
Republicans"?

Outrage 2: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said that "Mr. Ashcroft's past
positions on [issues including] segregation ... are very different from my
own." She is claiming, of course, that someone -- either she or Ashcroft --
actually supports segregation. Similarly, Leahy said the nominee "fought
voluntary school desegregation." These are outright lies.

Forced into the political version of "I no longer beat my wife," Ashcroft
responded thus to Leahy: "Nothing could be farther from the truth. I don't
oppose desegregation, I repudiate segregation." And a minute later, he
repeated that "I have always opposed segregation." The accusation and denial
stemmed from Ashcroft's effort as Missouri attorney general to prevent the
state from paying hundreds of millions of dollars to desegregate schools it
had never segregated in the first place. His opponents now are pulling the
time-tested stunt of turning disagreement about the means into disagreement
about the ends.

Outrage 3: Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said that Judge White "faced an
embarrassment and a humiliation on the floor of the Senate which did not
have to happen. If there was a heartfelt belief by the senators from
Missouri that he should not have been a federal district judge, it should
never have reached that point in time." In other words, Sens. Ashcroft and
Kit Bond should have exercised their prerogative as "home state" senators
(White was nominated to a judgeship in their state) to veto the nomination
right out of the chute rather than let it progress through the confirmation
process.

This jaw-dropping hypocrisy is staggering even for Democrats. Throughout the
hearing, as they had ad nauseam for years, Democrats attacked Ashcroft for
supposedly using tactics including "holds" to prevent nominees from moving
through the confirmation process. Just one day after telling Ashcroft that
he should have blocked the White nomination, Durbin complained that Ronnie
White "did not receive the same fair hearing ... that virtually every other
judicial nominee receives." If debating Judge White's record was
embarrassing, it's because he has an embarrassing record.

Outrage 4: Sens. Leahy and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Democrats would
oppose Ashcroft's nomination if they applied the same standard that led
Ashcroft to oppose the nomination of Bill Lann Lee to be assistant attorney
general for civil rights. Leahy insisted that the "Ashcroft standard" had
been nothing more than disagreement about policy positions, the same grounds
on which Democrats today oppose Ashcroft's nomination.

As he explained to Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., however, Ashcroft "considered
carefully whether the nominee would enforce the Supreme Court's most recent
ruling on racial quotas." Ashcroft opposed the Lee nomination not because he
held a different opinion about quotas, but because Mr. Lee would likely not
have enforced court rulings on this subject with which he personally
disagreed. Ashcroft responded to Leahy this way: "I joined with eight other
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee in opposing Bill Lee's
nomination ... because I had serious concerns about his willingness to
enforce the Adarand decision which was a recent decision of the United
States Supreme Court."

It turns out that the "Ashcroft standard" on such nominations was the same
as the Leahy-Schumer-Feinstein-Kennedy standard is today, namely, that a
Justice Department nominee be committed to enforcing even laws and court
decisions with which he disagrees. While conservative Ashcroft's record
shows he will, liberal Bill Lann Lee's record showed he would not.

Outrage 5: Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., charged that Ashcroft "organized
fringe police groups to oppose the [judicial] confirmation [of Ronnie
White]. John Ashcroft then recruited Kit Bond and other Republicans to vote
against Judge White" in a "shameless, cheap political sabotage of a fine
judge." Rep. Waters must define as "fringe" anyone who disagrees with her
because there's no way the National Sheriffs Association, Missouri Sheriffs
Association, and Missouri Federation of Chiefs of Police can otherwise be
considered "fringe police groups." And other, apparently fringe, law
enforcement groups have endorsed the Ashcroft nomination including the
National District Attorneys Association, the International Association of
Chiefs of Police, and many individual chapters of the National Latino Police
Officers.

Further, Ashcroft did not organize law enforcement groups to oppose the
White nomination; Sheriff Kenny Jones, whose wife was murdered by a man
Judge White sought to let off death row, did the organizing. And the 54
senators who opposed the White nomination examined the nominee's record and
simply came to a conclusion Rep. Waters does not share.

Outrage 6: The American taxpayer heavily subsidizes Ashcroft's attackers.
The Planned Parenthood Federation, for example, in 1999 received more than
$27 million; American Bar Association, nearly $5 million; National Coalition
Against Domestic Violence, nearly $1.7 million; National Education
Association, more than $1 million; just one of the government employee
unions, nearly $1 million; NAACP, more than $725,000; NOW Legal Defense &
Education Fund, more than $600,000.
All told, fewer than 20 of those leftist groups soaked up nearly $45 million
in 1999 alone.

Outrage 7: Ever since the Senate rejected the White nomination in October
1999, these leftists have claimed that senators voted against the nominee
because of his race. Former President Bill Clinton continued this lie on
Jan. 3, when he told the NAACP convention that Republicans blocked judicial
nominees "because of their race." Not only is there no evidence for this,
but many senators did not know Judge White's race until they were later
accused of racism for voting against him. If Ashcroft based his votes on
race, he would not have voted for every one of the 26 black nominees
confirmed by the Senate.

Rather than the perverse drive-by innuendo that senators voted against Judge
White because he was black, the real question is why senators voted for him
despite having opposed the death penalty far more than his colleagues during
his tenure.

Outrage 8: On Jan. 17, Sen. Durbin said that Judge White had been
"pilloried" and that what happened to him "should never happen to anyone." A
few days later, he and his fellow Democrats sent more than 400 written
questions to Ashcroft in addition to the pounding they gave him in the
hearing. These questions covered matters that had been discussed in that
hearing, such as why Ashcroft voted against certain judicial nominees, or
that are already a matter of public record. Such harassment is beneath the
"world's greatest deliberative body" and "should never happen to anyone."

Outrage 9: Lacking the votes to defeat the Ashcroft nomination on politics
alone, these leftists are urging a filibuster when the nomination reaches
the Senate floor. Kennedy, who has suggested he may lead a filibuster,
himself said during a 1995 filibuster against a non-Cabinet nominee that "It
is wrong to filibuster this nomination, and senators who believe in fairness
will not let a minority of the Senate deny [the nominee] his vote by the
entire Senate. We do a disservice to [the nominee], the Senate and the
Nation as a whole by prolonging this process."

Partisan hypocrisy is really ugly.

Outrage 10: These leftists are demonizing a man, not debating his
qualifications. They try to make him say things they can use against him
and, when he fails to take the bait, they accuse him of (Feinstein's words)
undergoing "a kind of metamorphosis" or (Schumer's version) an "evolution."

The assault against Ashcroft is part of the never-ending campaign against
President Bush, and his opponents will use these tactics against other
nominees unless he publicly denounces them and makes this part of the
Washington "way of doing business" that he has set out to change.

Mr. Jipping is Vice-President for Legal Policy at the Free Congress
Foundation.  His WorldNetDaily column appears on Thursdays.



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