http://tompaine.com/news/2001/01/30/index.html
SEVENTEEN QUESTIONS FOR JOHN ASHCROFT
Unasked and Possibly Excruciating Queries That Should Be Posed Morton Mintz
is a former chairman of the Fund for Investigative Journalism. He was a
Washington Post reporter for nearly thirty years before departing in 1988.
Editor's Note: During the 2000 presidential campaign, Mr. Mintz produced a
series of articles for TomPaine.com outlining questions that reporters -- on
behalf of the nation -- should be asking the candidates. In the same spirit,
this article poses questions for John Ashcroft, George Bush's nominee for
attorney general.
Justice Department Policies and Priorities
Q. To evade U.S. income taxes, Americans are transferring cash, securities
and other assets to foreign tax havens in an amount equivalent to, by one
unofficial but reliable estimate, the sum of "every tax dollar paid by
everyone in New York State and New Jersey who earns less than $200,000 a
year. " What will you do to halt this massive tax evasion?
Q. In August 1993, the National Law Journal surveyed the counsels of major
corporations, of which there are tens of thousands, and found that 66 percent
of them believed that their companies had violated federal or state
environmental laws during the previous year. There were very few
prosecutions. Do you believe this suggests that there is sufficient
enforcement of the environmental laws against corporate violators?
Q. As Attorney General of Colorado, Gale Norton, chosen by President Bush to
be Secretary of the Interior, favored letting corporate environmental
violators police themselves. Do you favor self-policing for corporate
environmental violators?
Q. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the number of fatal work injuries each
year between 1992 and 1999 at between 6,023 and 6,632 -- an average of 6,247
annually. Over the decades, obviously, there have been hundreds of thousands
of fatal on-the-job injuries. According to David Burnham, an expert monitor
of Justice Department data, perhaps five to ten percent were "a result of a
knowing violation of the law." Yet by the early 1990s, "one businessman had
gone to prison for violations of federal occupational safety and health law."
What will you do about this situation?
Corporate Crime v. Street Crime
Q. Are there two standards of criminal justice? Is there one standard for men
and women -- mostly poor and minorities -- who knowingly and willfully commit
crimes, often trivial ones like possession of tiny amounts of illegal drugs?
Is there another standard for corporate executives who knowingly and
willfully: market defective products that injure or sicken hundreds or
thousands of innocent people; pollute in grave violation of environmental
protection laws; seriously endanger workers in violation of occupational
safety and health laws, or lie to the Food and Drug Administration about
prescription drugs that cause injuries or deaths or were inadequately or
fraudulently tested?
Q. Do you favor the death penalty for corporate executives who knowingly and
willfully market lethally defective products, such as tires, SUVs, and IUDs?
Q. Can you name any corporate executives who have been indicted, prosecuted,
convicted and/or incarcerated for having knowingly and willfully marketed a
gravely or lethally defective product, gravely violated environmental or
occupational safety and health laws, or lied to the FDA?
Death Penalty
Q. Would you yourself be willing to administer a lethal injection or other
form of capital punishment to a person on death row?
Q. As governor of Texas, was George W. Bush "a man of no mercy"? In 1983,
Karla Faye Tucker, a drug-addicted prostitute, and her boyfriend brutally
murdered two people. On death row in Texas, she became a born-again
Christian, began a prison ministry that reached out to prisoners in other
states and countries as well as a great many in Texas, and admitted and
expressed remorse for her crime.
Tucker's lawyers asked the Board of Pardons and Parole -- all of whose
members were appointed by Governor Bush -- to commute her death sentence to
life in prison without parole, but the Board never met with her or her
attorneys, never met to consider the plea, and turned it down in private, and
without explanation.
In 1998, your close friend and backer, the Reverend Pat Robertson, pleaded
with Governor Bush to spare Karla Faye Tucker, saying that were he to refuse
to do so he would be "a man of no mercy." She was promptly executed.
Do you agree or disagree with Robertson's characterization of Governor Bush?
Q. During the election campaign, both Governor George W. Bush and Al Gore
justified the death penalty with the undocumented assertion that it deters
others from committing capital crimes. Numerous careful studies have found
that capital punishment does not deter as claimed. What evidence do you have
to challenge these studies?
Q. Most leaders of religious organizations -- Christian and Jewish --
maintain that the death penalty is an inappropriate punishment in today's
America. What is your response?
Justice Department Secrecy
Q. The Justice Department itself is violating the law by denying news
organizations, public interest groups and the general public access to
comprehensive information about how the Clinton Administration enforced the
nation's laws in 1999. Will you pledge to reverse this policy so it will not
happen again while you are Attorney General?
Criminal Justice Under Governor George W. Bush
Q. Texas spends only $4.65, on average, to defend a poor person charged with
a crime or crimes, and it has no organized system of public defenders. In a
recent report, the nonprofit Texas Appleseed Foundation said these facts help
to explain why the Texas prison population of 162,000 exceeds that of the
more populous California, and why Texas leads the country in executions (152
under Governor Bush). Would you say that Texas offers indigents and rich folk
equal justice under law?
Q. A study released last year by a Columbia University law professor examined
all death penalty convictions that were overturned between 1973 and 1995.
Nearly 40 percent of were reversed because of ineffective assistance of
counsel. Citing this finding, Attorney General Janet Reno said, "Our system
will work only if we provide every defendant with competent counsel." Do you
agree or disagree?
Campaign Finance
Q. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines a bribe
as: "Something, such as money or a favor, offered to or given to a person in
a position of trust to influence that person's views or conduct." Do the
campaign-finance laws legalize bribes? Or do you contend that big campaign
contributors -- including those to President Clinton and the Democratic
National Committee -- were not seeking to influence the views or conduct of
persons in positions of trust? And do you agree or disagree with Bob Dole's
statement, in 1983, that "[w]hen these political action committees give
money, they expect something in return other than good government"?
Pat Robertson
Q. You and the Reverend Pat Robertson have been very close, as evidenced by
his leadership of the campaign to win Senate approval of your nomination to
be Attorney General; his earlier efforts to elect you President of the United
States; the Christian Coalition's designation of you as a Coalition "100
percenter," and your inclusion in the "Inner Circle Sponsors" of a Washington
celebration of Robertson's seventieth birthday. Consequently, it's essential
to inquire whether you share such publicly expressed views of Robertson's as
the following:
"There is no such thing as separation of church and state in the
Constitution. It is a lie of the Left and we are not going to take it
anymore." (Address to the American Center for Law and Justice, November 1993;
in this as in numerous similar pronouncements, Robertson was blithely
contradicted by his top employee, Ralph Reed. While executive director of the
Christian Coalition in 1994 and 1995, Reed was telling audiences at the
National Press Club and various Jewish groups that separation of Church and
state must be "complete" and "inviolable.")
"I am bound by the laws of the United States and all fifty states. ... I am
not bound by any case or any court to which I myself am not a party. ... I
don't think the Congress of the United States is subservient to the courts.
... They can ignore a Supreme Court ruling if they so choose." (Washington
Post, June 27, 1986.)
"When I said during my presidential bid [in 1988] that I would only bring
Christians and Jews into the government, I hit a fire storm. 'What do you
mean?' the media challenged me. 'You're not going to bring atheists into the
government? How dare you maintain that those who believe in the
Judeo-Christian values are better qualified to govern America than Hindus and
Muslims?' My simple answer is, 'Yes, they are.'" (The New World Order, 1991,
page 218.)
"You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the
Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing.
Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist. I can love
the people who hold false opinions but I don't have to be nice to them."
("The 700 Club," January 14, 1991.)
"The public education movement has also been an anti-Christian movement. ...
We can change education in America if you put Christian principles in and
Christian pedagogy in. In three years, you would totally revolutionize
education in America." ("The 700 Club," September 27, 1993.)
"There may be more homosexuals and pedophiles in your [congressional]
district than there are Roman Catholics and Baptists." (Message to Congress
published as a full-page ad in the Washington Post, June 20, 1990.)
"The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a
socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave
their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism,
and become lesbians." (Fund-raising letter, 1992.)
"It is interesting, that termites don't build things, and the great builders
of our nation almost to a man have been Christians, because Christians have
the desire to build something. He [sic] is motivated by love of man and God,
so he builds. The people who have come into [our] institutions [today] are
primarily termites. They are into destroying institutions that have been
built by Christians, whether it is universities, governments, our own
traditions, that we have. ... The termites are in charge now, and that is not
the way it ought to be, and the time has arrived for a godly fumigation." (
New York Magazine, August 18,1986.)
"If anybody understood what Hindus really believe, there would be no doubt
that they have no business administering government policies in a country
that favors freedom and equality....Can you imagine having the Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini as defense minister, or Mahatma Gandhi as minister of
health, education, and welfare? The Hindu and Buddhist idea of karma and the
Muslim idea of kismet, or fate, condemn the poor and the disabled to their
suffering. ...It's the will of Allah. These beliefs are nothing but abject
fatalism, and they would devastate the social gains this nation has made if
they were ever put into practice." (The New World Order, page 219.)
Planned Parenthood "is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have
adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism -- everything
that the Bible condemns." ("The 700 Club," April 9, 1991.)
"Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing
to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is
happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based
media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse
and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America
today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."
(1993 interview with Molly Ivins.)
"I know this is painful for the ladies to hear, but if you get married, you
have accepted the headship of a man, your husband. Christ is the head of the
household and the husband is the head of the wife, and that's the way it is,
period." ("The 700 Club," January 8, 1992.)More such statements by Pat
Robertson might be painful for gentlemen as well as ladies to hear, so let's
turn to the final subject:
Corporation = Person, Fetus = Nonperson
In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decided, in part, in 1973, that during the
first trimester of pregnancy a fetus is not a "person" within the meaning of
the Fourteenth Amendment -- that is, the fetus is not a human being yet
capable either of being denied "the equal protection of the laws" or of being
deprived of "life, liberty, or property without the due process of law." In
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the High Court decided, in
1868, that the corporation, a paper entity with neither conscience nor soul,
is a person under that same amendment. In light of the following background,
can you reconcile the two decisions and answer the question at the end.
The Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade after reviewing numerous lengthy
briefs, hearing oral argument, and deliberating extensively. In a statement
with which I believe you agree, former U.S. Circuit Judge and former Yale Law
Professor Robert H. Bork famously denounced the ruling as "a wholly
unjustifiable usurpation of state legislative authority."
In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, the issue before the High
Court was whether the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of
the laws to every person prevented taxation (by Santa Clara County in
California) of property owned by a corporation (Southern Pacific Railroad) at
a higher rate than if owned by a human being.
The legislative history of the Amendment, which Congress proposed in 1866,
does not contain a word suggesting that the "person" to be protected could be
a corporation. Indeed, Justice Hugo L. Black, in 1938, would write: "The
history of the Amendment proves that the people were told that its purpose
was to protect weak and helpless human beings," these being the newly freed
slaves.
Yet only eighteen years after the Amendment had been ratified, in 1868, the
Supreme Court declared the corporation to be a person. There was no oral
argument, no deliberation. Instead, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite simply
made this announcement: "The Court does not wish to hear argument on the
question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the
Constitution, which forbids a state to deny any person the equal protection
of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it
does."
Q. If Roe v. Wade was "a wholly unjustifiable usurpation of state legislative
authority," what was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad?
- Re: [CTRL] SEVENTEEN QUESTIONS FOR JOHN ASHCROFT William Shannon
