Worldandnation: Senate confirms Ashcroft

Senate confirms Ashcroft

Eight Democrats join a unanimous GOP in supporting President Bush's choice for attorney general.

By MARY JACOBY

WASHINGTON -- Ending weeks of bitter debate, the Senate voted 58-42 to confirm John Ashcroft as attorney general Thursday in the most negative vote against a Cabinet-level nomination in a dozen years.

With Cabinet appointments usually facing little, if any, opposition, the 42 Democratic votes against Ashcroft surpassed the expectations of party strategists intent on using the nomination battle as a campaign issue in the crucial 2002 midterm congressional elections.

As late as Wednesday, Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota was calling 41 nay votes "as strong a statement, I think, as we could make," adding "frankly, we're not there yet."

But a string of late-breaking announcements in opposition from previously undecided Democrats, including Florida Sens. Bob Graham and Bill Nelson, sealed Ashcroft's fate.

He now goes down in history with John Tower, whose nomination by then-President George Bush for defense secretary in 1989 was defeated, and Ed Meese, approved as President Ronald Reagan's attorney general in 1985 with 31 senators opposed.

Democrats knew they did not have the votes to defeat Ashcroft, but they hoped to send a message to President Bush that he should not stray from the ideological center.

"It's a shot against the bow in terms of the Justice Department and how it conducts itself," future Supreme Court nominees, "and the push and pull within the Bush administration to be moderate and bipartisan or to play to the hard right," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

The final tally suggested that Republicans did not have the 60 votes necessary to cut off debate and end a Democratic filibuster of the nomination.

In fact, however, Democrats had little stomach for the knock-down, drag-out fight with a new president that would have come with a filibuster.

"We didn't have the votes," Schumer said.

By not being obstructionist, Democrats instead are trying to keep the debate on a professional level and not descend into the personal rancor that both parties have pledged to end in Washington.

"The votes (on other Bush Cabinet nominees) have been bipartisan, and this vote by definition, too, is bipartisan," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

But Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who helped preside over Ashcroft's confirmation hearings as the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, warned that a filibuster might have occurred "had this been a nomination for a life-time appointment," a reference to the Supreme Court.

Defeated for re-election in November, the one-term former Missouri senator's nomination as the nation's top law enforcement officer became a test of the parties' resolve for a new civility in Washington.

Democrats accused Bush of failing to live up to his promise of uniting a divided capital by appointing as the nation's top law-enforcement officer someone "so out of the mainstream," as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has put it.

In four days of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Democrats highlighted Ashcroft's personal beliefs against abortion and homosexuality and questioned his attitudes toward minorities.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, complained Thursday that Ashcroft's "record has been distorted."

But it was all part of a Democratic election strategy. By hammering away at their stark differences with Ashcroft on social issues, Democrats aimed to spur blacks, women, gays and other loyal Democratic voters to the polls in enough numbers to put them in control of the Senate in two years.

Republicans now control the evenly divided Senate by virtue of Vice President Dick Cheney's tie-breaking vote.

"I've been disappointed," said Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss. "I thought that the rhetoric did get too hot and, I thought, into a range of being unfair and inaccurate. But I don't think that should let us permanently alter the atmosphere."

Lott added, "What more should we want, a pound of flesh? We realize it's all about other things, but it's unfair."

The eight Democrats who voted to confirm Ashcroft were Sens. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Zell Miller of Georgia, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, John Breaux of Louisiana and North Dakotans Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan.

They all cited the desire to let a president appoint his own Cabinet as a reason for their yes votes.

Yet in the days before the vote, Daschle and his deputies worked hard to persuade wavering Democrats to oppose the nomination, arguing it would be a good campaign issue for the party.

On Wednesday, undecided Democrats began falling like rows of dominos against Ashcroft, including Graham and Nelson of Florida.

On Thursday a few hours before the vote, one of the last Democratic holdouts, Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota, announced his opposition in a speech on the Senate floor.

Sen. Max Cleland, a conservative Democrat up for re-election in GOP-leaning Georgia in 2002, also voted no. Cleland had struggled with a decision, caught as he was between two potent Georgia voting blocs. White evangelical Christians demanded he support Ashcroft, a member of a Pentecostal denomination. But black Georgians were strongly opposed, citing concerns about Ashcroft's civil rights record.

Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, who also voted no, faced the same quandary as Cleland. She, too, is a first-term senator who barely won election five years ago in a GOP-leaning state. But as a Southern Democrat, she relies heavily on the black vote.

And as a woman, she risked alienating an important source of campaign cash with a vote for Ashcroft: donors from the abortion-rights movement. Although Ashcroft has pledged to prosecute violent abortion clinic protesters, as a senator he worked to outlaw abortion in all cases except to save the life of the mother.

But Landrieu's home-state colleague, Breaux, voted to approve Ashcroft. His vote was seen as being colored in part by a desire to remain a favorite of Bush, who has made the conservative Democrat his "go-to" person among Senate Democrats.

In the end, most of the arguments against Ashcroft centered on civil rights questions. As attorney general, Ashcroft will oversee enforcement of the nation's civil rights laws.

Democrats accused Ashcroft of revising the history of his fierce opposition to court-mandated desegregation plans for St. Louis and Kansas City in the early 1980s.

In confirmation hearings, Ashcroft said that as Missouri's attorney general in the early 1980s he opposed the plans because they imposed large implementation costs on the state when the state had not created the segregation.

Yet Democrats noted that courts had found the state liable for some of the segregation and quoted from a 1984 St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial that accused Ashcroft and a Republican opponent for governor of, at the time, "trying to outdo each other as the most outspoken enemy of school integration in St. Louis" and "encouraging the worst racist sentiments."

Ashcroft also was criticized for his opposition to a black Missouri jurist for a federal judgeship, for making statements in praise of Confederate leaders to the neo-confederate magazine Southern Partisan, and for speaking at Bob Jones University, an evangelical school that until recently banned interracial dating.

Ashcroft took a beating on gay rights, too.

A former Democratic congressional aide, Paul Offner, said Ashcroft had asked him about his sexual orientation in a job interview for a position in Missouri state government when Ashcroft was governor.

Educator and philanthropist James Hormel held a press conference to complain that Ashcroft helped block his nomination as ambassador to Luxembourg because he is gay.

Ashcroft said in hearings that he opposed Hormel based on the "totality of the record." But previously, Ashcroft had said that Hormel was "a leader in promoting a lifestyle" and that he would not "effectively represent the U.S." in Roman Catholic Luxembourg.

At the hearings, Ashcroft also ducked a question about whether he would continue to enforce former Attorney General Janet Reno's policy of not making sexual orientation a factor for FBI security clearances.

Still, because Democrats did not attempt to filibuster the nomination, no one is willing to declare Washington's budding mood of bipartisanship and civility spoiled.

"I accept the olive branch extended by Sen. Russ Feingold," Lott said, referring to the sole Judiciary Committee Democrat who voted to advance Ashcroft's nomination. "He showed courage, and I won't forget it."