ASHCROFT, KENNEDY, RENO AND RACIAL JUSTICE

The best news about the Ashcroft confirmation hearing is that, at least, we
are not talking about his nanny. It's high time we stopped assuming that
the only legitimate way to challenge a nominee is through the unearthing of
private scandals -- drink, drugs, sordid sex and the occasional
undocumented Mary Poppins. Instead of indulging in the politics of personal
destruction, let's by all means engage in the politics of personal
convictions and drop the pretense that the Senate's "advise and consent"
does not extend to a nominee's beliefs.

It is much more edifying -- and healthier for our democracy -- to be
debating Ashcroft's political philosophy and record than to hear the
reasons why he sings but doesn't dance.

I worked with John Ashcroft in the mid-1990s when he was on the board of
The Center for Effective Compassion, which I had co-founded to help develop
community solutions to fighting poverty. At the time, he was a leader in
the Renewal Alliance, a caucus of 30 Republican senators and congressmen
committed to addressing neglected social problems, and the architect of the
charitable choice provision in the welfare reform bill. Not bad. Nothing in
our interactions prepared me for his acceptance of an honorary degree from
Bob Jones University in 1999 or his defense of the Confederacy in Southern
Partisan magazine in 1998. But Ashcroft made those decisions, and such
decisions matter. Discussing them is not a "personal attack."

My surprise was compounded by the memory of a conversation I wrote about
during the 1996 presidential campaign in which Ashcroft criticized Bob Dole
for turning down an invitation to speak in front of the NAACP, and stressed
how important it was for Republicans to reach out to African Americans.

Since I'm convinced that no policies under the purview of the Justice
Department will have a deeper impact on African Americans than how we
conduct the war on drugs, what most troubles me about Ashcroft's nomination
is his medieval perspective on our disastrous drug policies and his willful
blindness to their consequences. After all, among his official duties as
the country's chief law enforcement officer would be overseeing the Drug
Enforcement Agency.

Yet here is a sampler of his drug war record: champions mandatory minimums,
even co-sponsoring bills that expand them; opposes ending the crack and
powder cocaine differential; favors interdiction over treatment, going as
far as voting against a treatment-funding bill co-sponsored by Strom
Thurmond and Orrin Hatch -- hardly a cabal of bleeding-heart liberals.

Even a Ford Administration retread like Donald Rumsfeld told Congress at
his confirmation hearing that illegal drug use is "overwhelmingly a demand
problem" and that our current focus on interdiction is misguided.

More troubling still is the fact that, as governor of Missouri, Ashcroft
allowed his state police to keep the proceeds from forfeited drug assets
that were supposed to go to public schools. Even after a 1990 Missouri
Supreme Court decision found their actions to be in violation of the state
Constitution, the police continued to keep money earmarked for education by
turning its forfeiture cases over to federal law enforcement, which would
seize the funds and then generously kick back a share of the booty. In
1998, the U.S. Court of Appeals found that the Missouri Highway Patrol and
the Drug Enforcement Agency had "successfully conspired to violate the
Missouri Constitution."

"President-elect Bush," Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said during his
questioning, "has asked us to look in Senator Ashcroft's heart. ... But
actions speak louder than words." That, of course, is completely true. But
one of the greatest ironies of the controversy surrounding Ashcroft is that
on the watch of the current attorney general, the number of
African-American men in state prisons has doubled, and we have been
incarcerating black men at eight times the rate of white men. I'm only
looking at Janet Reno's actions, not her heart -- but if her record were
Attorney General Ashcroft's, does anyone doubt that it would be presented
as proof positive of his racism?

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that a black male born today has a
one in four chance of serving time in state or federal prison. It is fair
to ask Senator Ashcroft what he would do to reverse the trend in the
racially discriminatory sentencing that has escalated in the last decade.
But it is equally fair to ask the current attorney general whether
Ashcroft's friends at Southern Partisan could have come up with a more
destructive policy for African Americans than her own department?

Race, we have been told, will be the determining issue in the Ashcroft
nomination battle. The problem is that if we judge by results rather than
intentions -- as Sen. Kennedy asked us to do -- our criminal justice system
is unequivocally racist.

I know that it's not the attorney general's job to change unjust laws. But
given how many of our drug laws are unjust, shouldn't we be looking for
someone to head the Justice Department who, at the minimum, is cognizant of
that fact? And who will, therefore, allocate the department's limited
resources accordingly? That would rule out John Ashcroft -- but it would
also rule out Janet Reno.

If only Zoe Baird had paid her nanny on the books.