Word: ashcroft
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...even him to swallow. And thanks to Norton, a longtime advocate for oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, the strategist says, "we are also now undone with suburban women in the Midwest and California who care about the environment." Other Bush allies complain that by picking Ashcroft, a candidate to lead the Justice Department who offends the African-American community's sense of justice, Bush handed the other side a sure weapon to increase black turnout...
When Bush tapped Ashcroft, on the Friday before Christmas, the former Missouri Senator wasted no time; he got on the phone and began tracking down his Senate colleagues at home. The teetotaling son of a famed Pentecostal minister, Ashcroft, a onetime Missouri Governor so strict that he refused to dance at his own inaugural ball, is the kind of hard-line conservative who makes liberal toes curl. Yet as he reached Senate Democrats like Russ Feingold and his old Yale classmate Joe Lieberman, he was able to elicit warm responses, or at least pledges of neutrality. Feingold called...
...attacks. "This kind of outrage in breadth and depth and diversity--I can't remember anything like it," said Hilary Shelton, director of the N.A.A.C.P.'s Washington bureau. But in private, Senate Democrats were clear that, absent some shocking new smoking gun, they weren't likely to actually reject Ashcroft, Chavez or Norton. In a Senate divided evenly between the parties, only a simple majority is required for confirmation, meaning that Democrats would have to achieve astonishing unity (and find one Republican defector) to vote down one of the nominees...
That infuriated liberal activists, who scrambled to get Democrats to keep quiet and "stop message erosion," as a Senate aide put it, until they had time to dig into Ashcroft's past and shape a grass-roots campaign against him. But that will take some doing; even Ted Kennedy counts Ashcroft as a friend. "He's an able person, and he's got a good mind, and he's a hard worker," Kennedy told TIME. "We've tangled on policy issues," he added, predicting that "there will be sharp questioning over whether he's going to be in the mainstream...
...calendar and Constitution has seen to it that the Democrats will actually be in control of the Senate for the 17 days leading up to Bush's Inauguration. While no final votes will be taken before then, temporary Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy plans to open hearings on Ashcroft and may even call as a witness Ronnie White, the African-American judicial nominee whose candidacy Ashcroft famously torpedoed in 1999. White, the first black member of the Missouri Supreme Court, was Bill Clinton's choice for a federal district court seat. Ashcroft single-handedly built the opposition that crushed White...