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THE OBSERVATORY Ayatollah General January 16, 2001 |
| The "real" 21st century is off to a poor start - no commercial flights to the Moon, a doofus as President, and a right-wing religious zealot as prospective Attorney General ... |
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Thanks to Bush's cabinet nominations, we
now know what "compassionate conservatism" means: Compassion for the
well-connected, particularly corporate friends of the Bush family; conservatism for the
rest of us. If Ike Eisenhower's cabinet was once described as fourteen millionaires and a
plumber, Bush's can be described as fourteen corporate fixers and a couple of fanatics. The Bush cabinet picks fall into two fairly distinct groups. The first group come largely from what may be called the Ford wing of the GOP - no surprise, since in all likelihood they are really the Cheney cabinet. They have been appointed to the positions that corporate executives consider important, the managerial positions who deal with economic affairs and national defense. These are also, not quite coincidentally, the departments that issue fat, juicy government contracts. The establishment media has duly fawned over their "private sector" experience, but in fact there are no entrepreneurs among them. Like their patron, Dick Cheney, they are people who thrived in private industry not because of any special free-market genius, but because they are extremely well-connected. The Cheney Cabinet is of patronage, by patronage, and for patronage. By and large, though, they are decent guys by GOP standards; corporate conservatives rather than the Hezbollah kind. They are also reasonably competent, able to make sure the trains run on time. (Norm Minetta, besides being the token Democrat, also falls into this group.) With Colin Powell at State and Rumsfeld at Defense, ordinary ethnic cleansers may have little to worry about, but anyone stupid enough to attack oil wells is in real trouble. So much for the Cheney Cabinet. Then there is the Bush Cabinet -- the people chosen to deal not with the powerful but with the rest of us. Their outstanding members are (or were) the swiftly-departed and unlamented Linda Chavez, Gail Norton, and above all ex-senator John Ashcroft. (A senator who was beaten for re-election by a dead man would be laughed out of any other town, but Washington - especially George W. Bush's Washington - is singularly lacking in a sense of the absurd.) Unlike the Cheney team, this Bush team is made up of true believers, members one and all of the GOP's Hezbollah wing. Their other common denominator, at least for the surviving Norton and Ashcroft, is a peculiar sentimentality for the Confederacy. Norton seems to regret that the Union won the Civil War, while Ashcroft has written articles for the Southern Partisan magazine, which may fairly be characterized as the intellectual journal of the KKK. Of them, Ashcroft is far the most important and most dangerous. Attorney General is not just another cabinet office - the Attorney General wields the billy club of the federal government. No other cabinet office holds as much power over the lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of ordinary Americans. Ashcroft's promise to enforce even laws he disagrees with (i.e., laws that he regards as the Devil's work, like Roe v Wade) should be regarded as worthless. Every police chief everywhere has vast discretionary power, and we need not doubt how Ashcroft will exercise it. The smart money, for now, is that Ashcroft will be confirmed - if narrowly - thanks to the convention of senatorial courtesy, and to the convention that presidents should get a presumption in favor of their cabinet nominees. Perhaps this is true for elected presidents, but George W. Bush was not elected, save by one vote on the U.S. Supreme Court. And that is where we, ordinary people and ordinary Democrats, come in. It is up to us to hold the Senate Democrats' feet to the fire on the Ashcroft nomination. (In California, Barbara Boxer has already come out against him, but there's still Dianne Feinstein.) We need to insist that courtesy to a former senator take second place to justice for the American people. We need to demand that our elected officials fight for us, in turn for our fighting for them at election time. Something should be said here about the argument that rejecting a cabinet nominee for ideology - even an extreme ideology - would be an unhappy escalation of the famously uncivil tone in Washington. The short answer is that if Bush really wanted to change that tone, as he promised he would, he would have appointed someone besides Ashcroft. A longer answer - and one even conservatives might consider - is that it would be far more civil and honest to fight over straightforward policy issues, instead of unearthing, or inventing, scandals as a pretext for acting on political differences. (Whatever did Whitewater amount to? Oh, that's right: nothing.) It would have been better all around if Linda Chavez had been dumped for her extreme views, not over whether someone was a houseguest or a maid. I don't claim that John Ashcroft is a dirty rotten scoundrel, only an extremist.
And that is reason enough to reject him. He has no business being Attorney General,
and no senator who expects our votes should vote to confirm him. -- Rick Robinson
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