A Surprising Civil Rights About-Face for Ashcroft

When John Ashcroft was fighting to become attorney general four months ago, opponents portrayed him as a closet racist, a right-wing ideologue who they charged would turn the clock back a quarter-century in wiping out hard-fought civil rights gains.

But a strange thing has happened on the way to Armageddon. So far at least, Ashcroft has led the Justice Department on a path that, to the surprise of many, is not altogether different on civil rights matters than that of his Democratic predecessor.

Ashcroft has managed in general to avoid the pitfalls that many critics predicted would dog him in his new post. And he earned credit in recent days for acting decisively in postponing the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh after the discovery of investigative files the FBI had not made available to the defense in the case. But it is Ashcroft’s performance in the area of civil rights that has most defied expectations.

Since taking over at the Justice Department on Feb. 1, Ashcroft has signed off on a landmark $500-million desegregation settlement in Mississippi aimed at bolstering black colleges. He has sent federal attorneys to Cincinnati to investigate white-on-black police shootings. He has declared racial profiling a top priority. And he has allowed the department to use its clout to enforce wheelchair access for the disabled and voting rights for the disenfranchised.

Is this a new and progressive John Ashcroft, a champion of civil rights?

Some critics still are skeptical, and they warn that upcoming decisions concerning affirmative action and other key issues will signal whether Ashcroft truly is committed to enforcing civil rights laws in schools, police departments, polling places and elsewhere nationwide.

But Ashcroft’s early record--adopting moderate positions that he might have attacked in his U.S. Senate days--has elicited surprise from many liberal accusers and consternation from conservative supporters.

Consider the conversion of Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, a liberal group that works to combat anti-Semitism.

In January, in the midst of Ashcroft’s battle to win confirmation in the Senate, Foxman declared that he was “troubled” that Ashcroft’s strong Christian proclamations might limit religious freedom in his administration.

But earlier this month, Foxman stood side by side with Ashcroft in the ballroom of a posh Washington hotel at an Anti-Defamation League luncheon and praised the attorney general, who was the keynote speaker, as “a distinguished statesman . . . who is fully committed to fair treatment for all Americans.” ADL members stood to cheer Ashcroft’s remarks.

“He hasn’t done anything that a lot of his opponents said he would do,” Foxman said in an interview. “In terms of the fears and anxieties, they haven’t materialized.”

Not that everyone is happy about that. Some conservatives believe Ashcroft has become chastened by his bruising confirmation fight, resisting the kind of broad-based attacks on liberal civil rights policies that many expected from him. Some groups already are pressuring him to adopt a more conservative line--an idea that seemed virtually unthinkable just three months ago, when Ashcroft was skewered by Senate opponents for being too far to the right.

Conservative attorney Roger Clegg, for one, shares many of Ashcroft’s political views, and he wrote a column in a legal newspaper in January praising Ashcroft’s record.

So when Clegg’s group, the Center for Equal Opportunity, and several other stalwart conservative organizations appealed to the new attorney general in February on a major civil rights case that is pending, they expected a warm reception.

At issue was a North Carolina school desegregation plan that has divided black and white parents for three decades in the state’s largest school system. The Justice Department, under former Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, urged an appellate court last year to allow race to be used as a factor in deciding which schools children should attend, but the conservative groups asked Ashcroft to withdraw the department’s “race-based” stance.

The Justice Department, under Ashcroft, declined to do so. The status quo held.

“I was disappointed,” Clegg acknowledged. “I’m a fan of John Ashcroft, and I still have high hopes. I’m just more anxious now. . . . And obviously the more time that goes by and the fewer changes are made, the more anxious conservatives will become.”

Ashcroft appears “adrift,” unsure of his political moorings, charged Phil Kent, president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a conservative think tank in Atlanta.

“We need him to make bold decisions. We need to let John Ashcroft be John Ashcroft,” Kent said. “He has a reputation as a staunch conservative, and we want to make sure he stays that way.”

Some observers believe Ashcroft is simply biding his time, waiting for his key deputies to be installed in coming weeks and giving President Bush time to pick new federal judges before the Justice Department pursues a more hard-line approach to civil rights. Mainly because of procedural delays, none of the nominees for top Justice Department posts have come before the full Senate for confirmation, and the pick for civil rights chief has not even been considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Rerouting a train as massive as the 125,000-employee Justice Department is a slow process no matter who the conductor is. And the reality is that the vast majority of civil rights cases are litigated off the political radar screen and aren’t directly influenced by changes in administration, current and former Justice Department officials say.

So it is that the civil rights division under Ashcroft has continued to churn out decisions that have the familiar ring of the Reno administration.

Last week, for instance, the Justice Department forced the owner of 54 Wendy’s restaurant franchises to reconfigure his fast-food outlets to ensure access for people in wheelchairs.

The week before that, the department extracted a $25,000 settlement from a Milwaukee landlord for refusing to rent an apartment to an African American applicant.

And a week before that, the department reached an agreement with Tennessee officials requiring them to reconfigure their voting districts so that at least one of the 12 is made up of a majority of African Americans. In a case similar to minority voting rights suits pending in Ventura County and elsewhere, federal attorneys charged that Crockett County has unlawfully diluted the strength of its black voters for years.

Even in higher-profile cases, Ashcroft has shown little inclination to block cases that were in the pipeline long before he arrived.

The $500-million settlement for Mississippi’s black colleges, for instance, closes out a lawsuit dating back a quarter-century. It centers on contentious political questions of race and desegregation, but Ashcroft signed off on the settlement with little debate, sources said.

“If he had objected to it, it wouldn’t have gone through,” said one aide to Ashcroft who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue. “People expected a sea change, but I think that expectation was based on a false depiction of [Atty.] Gen. Ashcroft.”

That depiction was fueled in large part by things Ashcroft said and did in public life in recent years as a U.S. senator and as Missouri governor.

He praised the Southern “patriots” of the Civil War in an interview with a neo-Confederate magazine. He received an honorary degree from Bob Jones University at a time when the school banned interracial dating. He derailed the promotion of a black federal judge from his home state. And as governor, he opposed desegregation and voter registration plans in Missouri.

Opponents of Ashcroft’s nomination pounced on such controversies in charging that he was insensitive, if not overtly hostile, to the concerns of minorities.

Since his Senate confirmation Feb. 1--by the narrowest margin for an attorney general in 75 years--Ashcroft has made strides to reach out to those who were offended by his record. He has met with numerous minority groups, and he repeatedly has declared his commitment to civil rights.

Some critics, however, say the moves reflect political posturing more than substance.

Ashcroft announced recently, for instance, that he was authorizing more lawyers to work on civil rights cases, although the move was in the works before he took office. When Ashcroft asked Congress to order up data on racial profiling, he and his aides were apparently unaware that the Justice Department under Reno had been collecting similar data for 18 months.

But, lip service or not, the strategy appears to be paying off.

Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-N.Y), one of the House’s more liberal members, told Ashcroft at a hearing two weeks ago that, in Harlem and the South Bronx, where people fear that the attorney general “won’t protect them,” Ashcroft’s strong denouncements of racial profiling have met with “pleasant shock and amazement.”

“I give him high marks for style at this point, but the jury is still out on substance,” said Wade Henderson, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a liberal Washington group that opposed Ashcroft’s nomination.

“Ashcroft has clearly made a conscious effort to recast his image in a way that would identify him as a more balanced protector of interests than his Senate career would have suggested,” Henderson acknowledged. “But it’s still early.”

Indeed, Ralph Neas, head of the People for the American Way, which led the charge against Ashcroft, said other Republican administrations--particularly that of Ronald Reagan--also have moved cautiously before embarking on severe civil rights “reversals.”

“We’re on guard,” Neas said. “Unfortunately, given the record of John Ashcroft and his aides, we know what to expect, and we hope and pray that they prove us wrong.”