On the Right - What Ashcroft Might Have Said.(John Ashcroft)(Brief Article)(Column)

NEW YORK, JANUARY 19

Senator Feinstein, quizzing John Ashcroft, asked a question both interesting and profound. What I can't understand, she asked her former colleague in the Senate, is how you can feel as strongly as you do about all these issues and still undertake to enforce the law, as written and interpreted? All Mr. Ashcroft could say was what he said every few minutes to everyone, namely that he would do as he promised, enforce the law. Other witnesses, in Congress and elsewhere, agreed that he is a man without guile, that he will do as he said he would do.

We can take him at his word and feel confident. Of what, specifically? Confident that he would protect the right of abortionists ("reproductive- health consultants") to practice their profession, and protect also the right of free-to-choose enthusiasts to demonstrate. He was asked whether he approved of the Roe v. Wade decision, and he replied that he would not himself have voted as the Court had done, but that as far as he was concerned, Roe was the law of the land, and the law he would undertake to defend.

Other questions were less challenging. Someone got around to quoting something he had said to the effect that gun ownership was a device to guard against tyranny. The senator wanted to know-Are you saying, Senator, that we are living under tyranny? No, was the rejoinder. He might have answered, "Senator, the Second Amendment was passed as a hedge against the practice of tyranny, which had been exercised 15 years earlier. An endorser of the anti-establishment clause of the Constitution isn't affirming that right because he lives in a state with an established religion."

What Sen. Ashcroft manifestly did not feel at liberty to do was to expatiate heuristically on the subjects being explored. The First Amendment clause against an established religion is being variously interpreted and tested in different parts of the country. Most conspicuously, in the matter of public funds for private education, in the manner of junior GI Bills. Are we to assume that an attorney general who believes in vouchers, such as those being used in Florida, could expect no support from a Republican administration if the objection were raised before a federal court (which is bound to happen) that such vouchers were unconstitutional? It is a traditional practice for the Justice Department to file amici curiae briefs when an ...