The Chavez Nomination Stokes the Partisan Fires

What’s worse than an infidel? A heretic. An infidel is someone who never believed what you believe. A heretic is someone who believed what you believe but now has a different faith--that’s much more threatening. You fight wars against infidels, you start inquisitions against heretics.

From a liberal Democratic point of view, John Ashcroft, George W. Bush’s choice to be attorney general, and Gale Norton, the president-elect’s pick for Interior secretary, are infidels--they’ve been Republican conservatives all along. But Linda Chavez is a heretic. What’s happening to her now--the ferocity of the opposition to her nomination as secretary of Labor, including the flap about her Guatemalan-born house guest nearly a decade ago--flows from the infidel-heretic distinction.

The D.C.-based civil rights and civil liberties groups mobilizing against Ashcroft and the environmental groups lining up to oppose Norton know they have a win-win situation on their hands. It’s possible, albeit unlikely, that these liberal opposition outfits will block their targets; such a victory in the U.S. Senate would naturally enhance their power and prestige.

But paradoxically, Beltway-based liberal-left careerists would ultimately be better off if Ashcroft and Norton are confirmed, as they would then have Bush administration authority figures to diabolize. In short order, Ashcroft would be portrayed as another Ed Meese, the Reagan-era attorney general whom liberals loved to hate. And Norton would become, in the depiction of the Sierra Club, et al., a female James Watt, the Reagan Interior secretary who launched a thousand direct-mail fund-raisers from green groups.

But Chavez is different. She was once of the liberal left, working on Capitol Hill as a Democratic staffer, and then in the labor movement at the American Federation of Teachers. In 1984, she committed the heretical act of joining the Reagan administration, soon thereafter switching to the Republican Party. Like other Democrats-turned-Republicans such as Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, she brought to her new creed a thoroughgoing knowledge of the ideology she rejected--one more reason why heretics are so hated.

To be sure, Chavez is outspoken, even confrontational; as a political candidate, think-tanker and columnist, she has been loud and clear in her support for English as the national tongue and her opposition to bilingual education. And she has been honest enough to say publicly what everyone knows privately--that “affirmative action” programs usually become quota regimes.

But the irony is that, for all her toughness, her Senate confirmation could be undercut by what seems to have been an act of “compassionate conservatism.” The news that she once harbored an illegal alien in her house has cheered her ex-friends on the left. If Chavez has a “Zoe Baird problem”--referring back to Bill Clinton’s abortive Cabinet nominee who failed to pay withholding taxes on her nannies--then she, too, is finished.

But if, as Chavez and the woman in question, Marta Mercado, a now-legal immigrant from Guatemala, both insist, the relationship was benevolent, then she should have no problem. Indeed, as the story unspools, it turns out that the publicly hard-edged Chavez has been something of a secret softy; she has opened her home to others, too, including a Vietnamese refugee who speaks warmly of her.

It’s Chavez’s bad luck that the Democrats will convene her confirmation hearings next week, when they have a temporary majority. Senate Labor Committee chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) has already expressed concern--masking delight--about this “very troubling new allegation.” The new allegation, of course, goes on top of the old allegation, which is that she’s a heretical conservative. In the upcoming hearings, Kennedy is likely to try to “Bork” Chavez, just as he did to Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1987. As she sits there in Kennedy’s presence, Chavez might be tempted to ask the senior senator whether his compassion is limited to spending other people’s tax money.

Chavez would never say such a thing, of course. But she knows something more powerful. She knows, from her own life story, the dirty secret of the left, that big bureaucratic government is not compassionate. And if confirmed, she will carry that heretical knowledge into the highest councils of Washington, and from there, to the American people.