DAVID ESPO
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Former Sen. John Ashcroft won confirmation as attorney general Thursday, completing President Bush’s Cabinet and overcoming a ferocious Democratic assault on his conservative views and personal integrity. The vote was 58-42.
“The president of the United States, George W. Bush, is entitled to have his selection as attorney general,” Majority Leader Trent Lott said a few moments before the roll was called on the most contentious confirmation fight in a decade.
Vouching for the nominee’s honesty and integrity, he brushed aside weeks of attacks by Democrats, including many of Ashcroft’s former Senate colleagues. “I don’t know that person” they’re depicting, Lott said.
Democrats claimed a consolation prize, saying the 42 votes against the nomination would be enough to sustain a filibuster against future Bush administration nominations they deemed too conservative. The votes in opposition were the most against any attorney general in the nation’s history.
“He’s wrong on civil rights, wrong on a woman’s right to choose, wrong on needed steps to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children,” argued Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who led the fight against confirmation. “And he’s the wrong choice to be attorney general of the United States.”
But the result was a victory for Ashcroft and the new president. All 50 Senate Republicans and eight Democrats voted for confirmation of the former Missouri senator, whose long political career seemed over when he lost a re-election bid last November.
All the votes in opposition came from Democrats. They included not only liberal stalwarts such as Kennedy, but also the roster of potential presidential contenders who would need support from women’s groups and black voters to prosper in a 2004 campaign - Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, John Edwards of North Carolina, Evan Bayh of Indiana, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joseph Biden of Delaware.
Sen. Jean Carnahan, D-Mo., opposed Ashcroft in her first high-profile vote since taking the seat her late husband won from Ashcroft last November. Ashcroft, she said, “was just too divisive for our country.”
Republicans bristled at the attacks.
“I have absolute, total, complete confidence that he is going to be one outstanding attorney general of the United States,” said Don Nickles of Oklahoma, the GOP whip.
And Orrin Hatch of Utah, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, scoffed at Democratic claims. “If that’s the way you’ve got to send a message, by trashing a person’s reputation, distorting his record, that’s pretty pathetic,” he said.
Even before the vote, Republican sources circulated the names of likely top-ranking officials in a Justice Department headed by Ashcroft. These included Larry D. Thompson as deputy attorney general, the number two spot in the agency, and Theodore Olsen as solicitor general, the lawyer who represents the administration before the Supreme Court.
Thompson, a black lawyer who was U.S. attorney in Atlanta during the Reagan administration, was a key adviser to Clarence Thomas during his bitterly fought confirmation as a Supreme Court justice in 1991.
Officials said Thomas would swear the nation’s new top law enforcement official into office in a private ceremony at the Supreme Court.
Ashcroft’s conservative views, including his opposition to abortion and gun control, and his fight against a desegregation plan in St. Louis more than a decade ago, were never in doubt during the confirmation battle.
In four days of hearings last month, the former state attorney general, governor and senator sought to reassure his critics, saying he would serve “all the people” and enforce the nation’s laws despite his “personal preferences.”
In particular, he pledged not to seek a Supreme Court reversal of a woman’s right to abortion, said he would defend the constitutionality of gun controls he opposed in the Senate, and said the civil rights division was of particular importance to him.
