ACLU REPORT FINDS ASHCROFT RECORD RIFE WITH HOSTILITY TO CIVIL RIGHTS, CIVIL LIBERTIES
WASHINGTON -During recent confirmation hearings on former Missouri Senator John Ashcroft's nomination as United States Attorney General, the ACLU released a report that outlines a record rife with hostility to civil rights and liberties, and urged the U.S. Senate to carefully review Ashcroft's positions and policies as it considered his nomination as Attorney General of the United States.
"John Ashcroft's record demonstrates that he is willing to change the law to impose his particular religious and moral views on all Americans," said Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington National Office, which released the report -- "Not Moderate, Not Compassionate, Not Conservative: John Ashcroft's Radical Revisionism of Basic Constitutional Values in America" - on January 16, 2001. "Integrity in pursuit of such a goal is no virtue," Murphy said.
As a nonpartisan organization that has never endorsed or opposed Cabinet nominees, the ACLU did not take a position on whether Ashcroft should be confirmed by the Senate as Attorney General. Instead, the ACLU analyzed and disseminated his positions on important civil liberties issues and urged the Senate to evaluate them in light of grave responsibility and vast powers of the Attorney General. The ACLU issued a similar report sixteen years ago during the confirmation hearings on President Regan's nomination of Edwin Meese as Attorney General, and the ACLU testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Meese's nomination.
Ashcroft is a former Senator from Missouri and served two terms as Missouri Governor and two terms as Missouri's Attorney General.
In the report, the ACLU said that Ashcroft's legislative career has not been one of total hostility to civil liberties. But considered in its totality, Ashcroft's policies "represent radical notions about changing the Bill of Rights and the Constitution to conform to his vision of liberty and justice for some."
The ACLU report examined the Ashcroft record in eight specific areas, including a fundamental disdain for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and a willingness to eviscerate other rights, such as religious liberty, free speech, reproductive freedom and remedies designed to seek racial equality.
"After an examination of Sen. Ashcroft's statements and his votes on major federal legislation," the ACLU's Murphy said, "we conclude that he supports a radical evisceration of rights as we now know them."
The report concludes that the Ashcrot's record shows a fundamental disdain for the constitution, and that he has supported an erosion of our existing constitutional framework. Sixteen times he sponsored or supported amendments to the Constitution, including amendments that would dilute rights already protected by the Constitution.
'Certainly, conserving the Constitution and the Bill of Rights seems to have been absent from among Ashcroft's concerns during his service as an elected official, both in Missouri and in the U.S. Senate,' the report states.