STATES' RIGHTS TAKE A BACK SEAT IN ASHCROFT'S JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

WHETHER discussing terrorist threats, the importance of religious faith in
public life or the role the death penalty should play in American justice,
Attorney General John Ashcroft seems informed by a moral certainty not
often associated with lawyers.

He has, for instance, recently overruled the recommendations of local
federal prosecutors in 28 cases where they decided not to seek the death
penalty. He has similarly used federal prosecutions to override state laws
concerning social issues like medicinal marijuana and doctor-assisted suicide.

Whether by force of circumstances, personality, ideology or a combination
of all three, Mr. Ashcroft may be forging a new role for himself and the
Justice Department.

He is not, though he attended Yale and the University of Chicago Law
School, a patrician establishment lawyer like Francis B. Biddle, who served
under President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II. He is not a lion
of the bar like Edward H. Levi, who was appointed to the position by
President Gerald Ford after Watergate.

He is not a political crony like John N. Mitchell, who served under
President Richard M. Nixon, or Edwin A. Meese III, who served under
President Ronald Reagan. And he is not, though he served as Missouri's
attorney general, a career law enforcement official like Janet Reno.

Mr. Ashcroft has vast political experience, serving two terms as governor
of Missouri and one term in the Senate. But his religious background has
played at least as important a role in shaping his philosophy.

"The terrorist attacks have energized Ashcroft in a remarkable way,
resonating with his sincere belief that there is evil in the world," said
Nancy Baker, an associate professor of government at New Mexico State
University and the author of "Conflicting Loyalties," a history of the
attorney general's office. "As the son and grandson of Assembly of God
preachers, he is spiritually as well as politically inclined to do battle
with evil."

That conviction, reinforced by the terrorist threat, has lately caused him
to revise his practices, if not his stated views, about executive power,
states' rights and the autonomy of local law enforcement.

"There is a lot more centralization of power," Professor Baker said, "and
that reflects his view that law is a moral imperative to be used as a sword."

Mr. Ashcroft still talks in the conventional formulations of the modern
legal conservative. His critics, he said in a speech in November, "view the
idea of faithful adherence to the text and original intent of the
Constitution as some sort of vice, some perverse affliction to be cured by
attendance at Yale."

"In my case," he added, "that particular course of treatment happily failed."

But lawyers who served under his predecessor, Ms. Reno, argue that she was
in some ways more conservative when it came to dispersed power and local
autonomy.

"There is something ironic about the contrast," said E. Kinney Zalesne, who
served as counsel to Ms. Reno. "She is the one who empowered locals, and he
is the one who is concentrating federal power."

William P. Barr, who served as attorney general under the first President
Bush, said Mr. Ashcroft was right to set uniform federal policies.

"The problem with Reno was that the only thing she would communicate with
the field about were idiotic notices about things like deadbeat dads," he
said. "There is a role for a strong leader of the federal law enforcement
function who has a clear idea of what should be done to protect the United
States. Substantively, he is right about those things that are being
centralized."

Mr. Ashcroft has pointed to a role model.

"We've borrowed something from a previous Department of Justice - Robert F.
Kennedy's Department of Justice - where it was said that they would arrest
a mobster for `spitting on the sidewalk' if it would help in the fight
against organized crime," he told a group of police officers last summer.
"We've been similarly aggressive in our effort to prevent future terror
attacks."

Some said they saw stylistic similarities between the men. "This is a very
adventuresome and aggressive department," said Charles Fried, who served as
solicitor general under President Reagan. "It's like Bobby Kennedy in the
civil-rights era."

But the comparison infuriated others.

Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, who served under Kennedy and succeeded him as
attorney general, said, "He uses it to justify some things that Bobby
Kennedy never would have tried to justify," including expanded surveillance
powers for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and more cooperation between
foreign and domestic intelligence agencies. "The problem today is that it
is very hard to know the limits of what they're trying to collect," Mr.
Katzenbach added.

Mr. Ashcroft has said it was the times and not the predispositions of any
one man that required the rethinking of the Justice Department's mission
and priorities.

"In order to fight and to defeat terrorism," he told the Council on Foreign
Relations last week, "the Department of Justice has added a new paradigm to
that of prosecution - a paradigm of prevention."

But Mr. Ashcroft's language also reveals how his personal convictions help
inform his thinking about the rule of law. "Order and liberty go together,
like love and marriage," he told a group of judges in August. "You can't
have one without the other."