The Economist

Steamroller Ashcroft

Sun May 4 02:07:27 2003
208.152.73.8

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=1748616

Steamroller Ashcroft

May 1st 2003
>From The Economist print edition

Conservatives beware: an out-of-control attorney-general is trampling on
your principles

SO FAR, the debate about John Ashcroft has focused mainly on the war
against terrorism. Libertarians moan that the hyperactive
attorney-general has hugely expanded the government's power to monitor
citizens (by wiretapping their telephones and so on); that he has made
it much easier to detain and deport immigrants and foreign visitors,
particularly Arabs; and that he has ruthlessly accumulated power over
the country's sprawling judicial system in his own hands. Conservatives
wearily retort that wars force everybody to rethink the balance between
freedom and security. Surely the attorney-general is duty-bound to err
on the side of vigilance to thwart another September 11th?

Well, yes. But what if you examine Mr Ashcroft's record in other areas,
such as medical marijuana, assisted suicide and the death penalty? You
find precisely the same pattern of John-knows-best centralisation. The
country's terror-fighter has also become the country's self-appointed
moraliser-in-chief. And he is trampling all over two conservative
principles he used to espouse: limited government and localism.

Begin with an idea precious to most Republicans: states' rights. Mr
Ashcroft has prosecuted "medical marijuana" users in California despite
a state initiative legalising the practice. He has tried numerous ploys
to challenge Oregon's assisted-suicide law (including encouraging the
Drug Enforcement Administration to revoke the licences of participating
doctors), thus snubbing both the state, which has passed the law not
once but twice, and the Supreme Court, which has explicitly left
policymaking in this area to the states. He has repeatedly tried to
bully local federal prosecutors into seeking the death penalty, despite
a long tradition of local discretion in death-penalty cases.

Mr Ashcroft's new reverence for central government is beginning to seem
downright Democratic, if not Gallic. The whole point of the American
political system is its sensitivity to local differences. Federalism, as
Justice Louis Brandeis put it, means "that a single courageous state
may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social
and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country." It
also means that a huge country with a richly diverse population can try
lots of different approaches to moral issues. People in rural Nebraska
can adopt a different approach to lap-dancing from people in San
Francisco; Vermont can demonstrate its uniqueness by favouring both gay
marriage and tight controls on internet porn.

"Moral federalism" has deep roots in America. The English Parliament's
Act of Toleration (1689) left religious issues almost entirely to local
discretion. People with different religious views congregated in
different regions-Puritans in Boston, Catholics in Maryland and so on.
The Founding Fathers laboured mightily to keep the federal government
out of dictating civic virtue. James Madison noted (in Federalist Paper
56) that different groups progress at different speeds. Alexander
Hamilton (in Federalist 17) argued that any attempt to impose a
centralised morality would be "as troublesome as it would be nugatory".
The local administration of justice is "the most powerful, most
universal and most attractive source of popular obedience and
attachment".

This tradition of moral federalism would seem particularly practical
now. The country is still basically split down the middle politically,
and this political divide reflects a deeper division about values. When
it comes to matters such as God and sex, many of the people who voted
for George Bush live in a different moral universe from Al Gore's
supporters.

There are clearly some areas where the federal government has to step in
to protect individual rights. It was right to use its might to dismantle
segregation in the South. Mr Ashcroft has legal grounds to argue that
the constitution guarantees individual citizens the right to bear arms.
But in general the Justice Department needs to err on the side of
caution on issues where reasonable people can disagree. It should
recognise that different communities have very different views: large
cities, for instance, voted for Mr Gore by a 71% to 26% margin, while
small towns and rural areas voted for Mr Bush by 59% to 38%. And it
should try, as far as possible, to allow those communities to make
decisions for themselves, rather than forcing them to bow the knee to
Washington. Agreeing to disagree offers the country the best chance of
avoiding an endless culture war in which both sides use the federal
government to enforce their views.

Nobody should be more worried about Mr Ashcroft than conservatives.
Hasn't it usually been the Democratic Party that has championed big
government and Washington-knows-best morality? And hasn't it usually
been the Republican Party that has stood for local variety? In the 1990s
the Republicans owed many of their biggest successes-from welfare reform
to school vouchers-to their enthusiasm for federalism. Mr Bush owes his
job partly to the quintessentially federalist Electoral College.

A mistake by any measure
Mr Ashcroft's conversion into a centraliser is both hypocritical and
short-sighted. It is hypocritical because Mr Ashcroft was once a leading
critic of big government. As attorney-general and then senator for
Missouri, he resisted a federal injunction to desegregate St Louis's
schools so vigorously that the Southern Partisan, a neo-Confederate
magazine, singled him out for praise.

It is short-sighted because, as an evangelical who refrains from
smoking, drinking, dancing and looking at nude statues, Mr Ashcroft
represents a minority in his own party, let alone the country. He has no
chance of winning the culture wars: the forces arrayed against him, from
the media to the universities, are too vast. The best he can hope for is
a live-and-let-live attitude that gives minority views like his own room
to flourish. Mr Ashcroft will come to rue his Faustian bargain with the
federal government the next time a Democrat sits in his office.
=========================================================
http://www.steamshovelpress.com/offlineillumination12.html"
"The US Secret Govt Rears Its Ugly Head in the Bush Cabal"
By Jackson Thoreau
http://www.steamshovelpress.com/offlineillumination12.html

R.I.C.O. Lawsuit Against G.W. Bush

[The actual lawsuit has not yet been filed. This is a notice of claim.]
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/rico_bush.htm   

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