From a news release from People For The American Way, discussing a report they created called The Case Against the Confirmation of John
Ashcroft as Attorney General of the United States: Part One - An Overview of the Senate Years.
The criticisms leveled at Ashcroft in the report include:
- He distorted and misrepresented the record of a highly qualified African American Missouri Supreme Court Judge, Ronnie White, and misled his colleagues in the Senate in order to sabotage White's nomination to a federal district court.
- He has led attempts to amend the Constitution and pass legislation that would virtually eliminate a woman's reproductive rights by banning abortions, even for rape and incest victims.
- The abortion ban he proposes is so extreme that it could be used to outlaw widely accepted and commonly used birth control methods including the Pill and IUDs.
- He engaged in extremist rhetoric to enforce an anti-abortion litmus test against a highly qualified African American physician, Dr. David Satcher, who, despite Ashcroft's attacks, won confirmation by a two-thirds majority as Surgeon General in 1998. During the Senate debate on Dr. Satcher's nomination, Ashcroft accused him of being "someone who is indifferent to infanticide."
- Similarly, abortion was the litmus test Ashcroft applied in helping to block Dr. Henry Foster's confirmation as Surgeon General in 1995.
- He employed another litmus test issue, affirmative action, to help block a full Senate vote on the nomination of Asian American Bill Lann Lee as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, a position under the direct supervision of the Attorney General.
- Ashcroft has opposed legislation designed to end workplace discrimination (the Employment Non-Discrimination Act) and to protect vulnerable groups of Americans against hate crimes (the Hate Crimes Prevention Act).
- He has given public praise to the far right magazine Southern Partisan, a neo-Confederate fringe publication that promotes the view, among others, that slavery was beneficial to the enslaved Africans.
- He cast the sole vote in 1999 against a continuing resolution to keep the federal government running and has voted with big tobacco, with gun manufacturers, and against a national drunk driving standard.
- He consistently receives top ratings and endorsements from far right groups such as the National Rifle Association and the Christian Coalition, a distinction conferred only on their most dependable allies.
- Ashcroft takes a cavalier attitude toward the Constitution, as evidenced by his frequent efforts to amend it. In just six years in the Senate he introduced or sponsored seven attempted amendments. One of the most radical of these was one he proposed in 1996 that would have changed the Framers' original framework in order to make it much easier to amend the Constitution, thus opening the way for disastrous political and ideological mischief.