TodayLooking good, if only in retrospect
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One of the few bits of good news to come out of the 2000 election for Democrats was the defeat of incumbent Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo.
Ashcroft staked out what most people considered to be the farthest right wing of discourse, running on the whole Moral Majority issue checklist to win two terms as Missouri governor and one Senate term.
So when his second Senate campaign ran aground at the hands of Mel Carnahan, the incumbent Missouri governor who died in a plane crash a few weeks before the election, Democrats were happy to wave goodbye to Ashcroft, thinking his brand of politics was finally on the wane.
Those celebrations were short-lived, however, as the incoming Bush administration named Ashcroft attorney general. And sure enough, his personal blend of sanctimony and politics came to be a staple of the news cycle.
There was that whole kerfluffle with the half-naked statues in the Justice Department headquarters, which in the past 70 or so years had been a problem for no other attorney general save Ed Meese. The Reagan administration's top law enforcer was famously photographed in front of the statues while waving a copy of his much-ballyhooed report on pornography in the United States.
After 9/11, it became known that Ashcroft had been downplaying domestic counter-terrorism programs, red-penciling nearly half a billion dollars from the $2.1 billion proposed for such programs.
But not to worry, once the attacks were behind us Ashcroft became a true believer, writing memos justifying torture, advocating strongly for the Patriot Act as well as Patriot II, and blindly signing off on warrantless searches for the executive branch.
Every so often, Ashcroft would call press conferences to announce “breakthroughs” in the war against homeland terror. These would be the indictments of such people as the guy who thought he could dismantle the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch and another guy who Ashcroft claimed was going to lead an al Qaida attack on a shopping mall in Columbus, Ohio.
And when his Justice Department finally got its hands on a supposed 9/11-related case involving four Arab defendants in Detroit, the prosecution overstepped legal boundaries so badly - Ashcroft himself violated the judge's gag order regarding the case - that the convictions were overturned on appeal.
All told, Ashcroft was a real canary in the coal mine when it comes to the current popular impression of the Bush administration as stubbornly incompetent and disconnected from the real world.
So it was a minor surprise to me that he chose to resign after the first Bush term and leave his ideological fellows behind. What is a major surprise to me is that I'm about to say something complimentary about the guy.
Of course, that compliment comes in the wake of the wreckage left by his successor, Alberto Gonzales, a guy who has managed to make Ashcroft look like a poster boy for the ACLU.
James Comey, Ashcroft's former no. 2 man at the Justice Department, told a Senate committee last week the story of how he and several other career Justice attorneys raised questions about a wiretapping program the executive department was using to fight terrorism because the surveillance was being undertaken without warrants.
The program required a Justice Department finding of legality to be signed by a certain date and Comey, who was left in charge while Ashcroft was rushed to the hospital for treatment of gallstones, refused to sign off on it. This resulted in the now-famous Keystone Kops dash to the hospital by Gonzales, then the president's personal attorney, and Bush's chief of staff Andrew Card, to get Ashcroft to overrule Comey.
From his intensive-care bed, Ashcroft rejected Card and Gonzales' entreaties and referred them back to Comey. The administration continued to run the program until Comey, Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Muller apparently threatened to resign.
Finally, Bush himself went to Comey and asked him to suggest whatever changes were necessary for him to approve the program.
Keep in mind that Ashcroft had apparently signed off on the questionable program in the past, until career Justice attorneys called his attention to the legal problems with warrantless wiretapping. So we have to give full points to Ashcroft not just for revisiting his previous opinion, but for standing behind the attorneys who advised him.
Newsweek reported this week that Ashcroft advocated due process for Guantanamo detainees as well as a civilian trial for Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged st hijacker,” though he chose not to take those disagreements with the administration line public.
On the strength of that background, it's a lot easier to understand why Ashcroft decided one term was enough as a member of the Bush administration.
Given the evidence of the past week, I'm can't believe I'm about to type this: You done good, Johnny - even if only by comparison.
