Exit Ashcroft, Enter Gonzales

“Mr. Ashcroft's legacy has been an open hostility to protecting civil liberties and an outright disdain for those who dare to question his policies. We need to do more than just replace John Ashcroft; we need a wholesale re-examination of Justice Department policies that trample on civil liberties and human rights." - Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"The underlying cause of crime in America is criminals." John Ashcroft

Now that John Ashcroft is packing it in and heading back to Missouri, will the drapes be coming off the bare-breasted statuary in the halls of Justice? Perhaps they could be converted into sackcloth for the many Muslims he callously tossed in jail with no legal recourse. Or maybe they could be sewn into blinders for the next staff at the DOJ? With Bush at the tiller, its doubtful that the next team will veer too far from the course set by the current attorney general.

Ashcroft's tenure at Justice ended with a fizzle. After fashioning the 350 pages of the notorious Patriot Act (which effectively eviscerates the 4th amendment), he devoted himself to the various chores of harassing terminally ill patients protected under Oregon state law (trying to end their lives in dignity), disrupting the sale of medical marijuana to cancer patients, and ferreting through the medical records of women who had legal abortions. No effort was ever spared to ensure that his narrow view of personal morality was rigorously applied like a tourniquet. But these are just minor details in the broader Ashcroft legacy. The real meat-and-potatoes of his four-year tenure was his Klansman-like zeal in rounding-up and persecuting innocent Muslims – 5,000, give or take a few. It was a task for which the autocratic general was particularly well suited. As proficient as Ashcroft was in detaining terror suspects on any imaginable pretext (his favorites were material witness, immigration violations or, the favorite, no charges at all) he was much less adept at getting convictions. As David Cole of the Nation magazine points out, of the 5,000 suspects Ashcroft arrested not one has been convicted of terrorism. The only conviction obtained was thrown out by a federal judge in Detroit. The rest were settled through plea agreements – deals that were struck through coercion and threats of being sent to Guantanamo if defendants refused to cooperate. The presumption of innocence was as breezily discarded as was most of the Bill of Rights. The result is an unblemished record of failure that will be filed in the national archive as the biggest flop in American history.

Its hard to know what to make of Ashcroft, a man who thinks God entrusted him with His terrible swift sword to dispatch the infidels. His religious convictions never included defending the meek or the poor in heart. They may be swept upwards to the kingdom of heaven, but they could always count on short-shrift from the A.G. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports: Like Bush, Ashcroft stuck to conservative positions on a wide range of issues. He sought to limit judges' flexibility to reduce criminal sentences, to have the federal death penalty applied more uniformly nationwide and targeted Internet pornography for high-profile crackdowns. In other words, punishment was the Ashcroft panacea for all ailments. Suspects could always count on a touch of the lash whether guilty or not. There was no sparing the rod in the Ashcroft regime. Under his leadership the concept of justice was put through the juicer and replaced with his favorite substitute: incarceration. As a result, respect for the office has withered considerably. Ashcroft's contempt of legal precedent may impress his friends at the Federalist Society, but its done little to elevate his standing with the American public.