ALAN HALE’S LETTER TO THE SENATE
OPPOSING THE CONFIRMATION
OF JOHN ASHCROFT AND GALE NORTON
You will recall that I contacted you last week
concerning my thoughts on the John Ashcroft and Gale Norton nominations to the
Cabinet. With the Senate confirmation
hearings due to begin in earnest later this week I'd like to share my thoughts
in somewhat greater detail.
Before beginning, I'd like to mention again --
and in fact I cannot stress this enough -- that George Bush did not win
the Presidency of the United States as determined by the vote of the American
people. Even if he had won the Presidency legitimately through the rules of the
Electoral College, he lost the nationwide popular vote to Al Gore by over half
a million votes, and thus his agenda does not reflect the majority will of the
American people. But furthermore, as the media-initiated counts of
previously-uncounted votes in Florida continue to reveal, it is almost certain
that Al Gore won the popular vote in that decisive state, and thus was
legitimately entitled to that state's Electoral Votes, and consequently the
Presidency.
Nevertheless, it of course appears that George
Bush is going to be inaugurated into the Presidency on Saturday, and I am cognizant
enough of the political realities to understand that the Senate is going to
have to work with him. There may indeed be occasions when the Bush
administration and the U.S. Congress will be able to work together to produce
legislation and results benefiting our country and its people. However,
especially given the extremely questionable circumstances under which George
Bush was awarded the Presidency and his clear lack of a mandate from the
people, the Senate is under no obligation to allow George Bush to push
undesirable elements of his agenda onto the people who did not elect him. The
Senate has the right -- and I would go further and say the duty -- to resist
and block any efforts to do this. The two Cabinet nominees whom I have
mentioned and discussed with you earlier are two examples of this.
Much has been written about John Ashcroft's
extreme right-wing views on civil rights and on a woman's right to choose, his
misrepresentation of Judge Ronnie White's record in his ultimately successful
effort to block Judge White's appointment to the Federal bench, his interview
and statements in the pro-Confederate journal "Southern Partisan,"
and his apparent links to groups such as Gun Owners of America which have
advocated more guns in schools. I add my voice to the chorus of those who say
he should not be confirmed to the office of Attorney General because of items
such as these. I wish to focus, however, on another issue of great importance
to me, and that is John Ashcroft's views on the role of religion in our
government, and how I believe those would affect his performance as Attorney
General.
This is not a criticism of John Ashcroft's
personal religious views and practices. Like any other American, John Ashcroft
has every right to believe in and practice whatever religious beliefs he
wishes, and to do so without condemnation. He does not, however, have the right
to try to use the power of the government to force his religious beliefs and
practices onto other people. His publicly stated viewpoints on a number of
issues lead me to believe that this is precisely what he would do. Furthermore,
it is no secret that his biggest supporters, both when he initially tried to
run for President, and now in the struggle for his confirmation to Attorney
General, are individuals such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who have
publicly stated their goals to turn America into a "Christian
nation."
In his now widely publicized speech at Bob
Jones University John Ashcroft declared that America "has no King but
Jesus." John Ashcroft is wrong: America has no King -- whatsoever. We are
a nation founded on the underlying rule of "We the People" and we
have an (ostensibly) elected President and elected representatives in the
Congress. While it is true that many Americans are Christians to whom Jesus
might be "King" in a personal and spiritual sense, there are millions
upon millions of Americans for whom this is not true. There are millions of
Jews in America; Jesus is not their King. There are hundreds of thousands, if
not millions, of Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Wiccans; Jesus is not their
King. There are the many Native Americans -- including many right here in New
Mexico -- who practice their traditional religious beliefs; Jesus is not their
King. There are millions of Americans who have no strong religious beliefs of
any kind; Jesus is not their King.
America is not a "Christian nation,"
nor a nation for any other religion; we are a secular nation. The U.S.
Constitution mentions religion only twice: in Article VI, where it says
"no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any Office
or public trust under the United States," and in the First Amendment,
where it says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." According to former
President Thomas Jefferson, who I would say speaks with some authority on this
issue, the purpose of the First Amendment's religion clause was to "build
a wall of separation between church and state." That wall has helped to
make America one of the most religiously diverse, and religiously believing,
nations on Earth, and it has properly kept religion and the government from
interfering in each other's business.
We should keep in mind, however, the words of
the French General Marquis de Lafayette, who, after the American Revolution,
uttered: "If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they
will fall by the hands of the clergy." When I see Pat Robertson and Jerry
Falwell state their "Christian America" rhetoric, and so
enthusiastically embrace and support John Ashcroft and his "no King but
Jesus" statements, I shiver. The founders of this nation were all too
aware that in the past, when religions have controlled government, the results
were witch-burnings.
I've
read that John Ashcroft has stated that it is the government's job to
"legislate morality." He is wrong again; it is the government's job
to "establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common
defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to
ourselves and our posterity." It is not the government's job to
decide what I may or may not do in my own bedroom, or to decide what I may or
may not read, or to decide what god I will or will not pray to, or to decide
what god I will or will not call "King."
Turning to Gale Norton, I've also read many of
the articles discussing her apprenticeship under former Interior Secretary
James Watt, her advocacy of allowing polluting companies to oversee
"voluntary compliance" of environmental regulations -- the metaphor
of the fox guarding the henhouse comes to mind -- her advocacy of allowing oil
drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and even her apparently supportive
statements of the Confederacy in the context of the state's rights issue. I
again add my voice to the chorus of those who say her nomination to head the
Department of the Interior should be rejected on these grounds.
However, there is again one specific issue I
would like to address. I've read that Gale Norton has said that George Bush's
policies would be her policies. I'm not quite sure exactly what she means by
that. However, I've also read that she's stated her beliefs that the issue of
global warming is an open question, and during the third Presidential debate
George Bush stated his belief that "the jury is still out on this."
For the scientific community, however, this is not an open issue; it is real.
There may be discussion and disagreement on the specific effects of different
processes and how much these have been properly accounted for, but as evidenced
in the international scientific report released this past fall the phenomenon
is real and is getting worse. The report sees the distinct possibility, if not
probability, of enormous global climatic changes taking place during the next
few decades, which will only be exacerbated if we don't start taking action
now.
I perhaps should add here that global weather
and climatic systems are chaotic in a mathematical sense, i.e., small changes
introduced into the system at one point can wreak enormous and unpredictable
effects on the system thereafter. Frankly, we don't know exactly what will
happen to the earth's climate patterns as a result of all the changes we are
introducing to them, but the fact that we are indeed causing changes to these
patterns, and that we and our descendants will have to deal with the results --
whatever they are -- in the future is indisputable. Is it not prudent to take
steps now to alleviate the future harmful effects of our actions, instead of
sticking our heads in the sand and pretending, in spite of the evidence, that
we're causing no harm or that "the jury is still out?"
Even if we were to take the view that
destroying the environment in our own country is fine, the global weather and
climatic patterns neither know about nor respect our arbitrary political
boundaries. What we do here in the U.S. affects everyone else on this planet.
Regardless of what we might want to do to our own environment in this country,
we have no moral right whatsoever to destroy the environment for all the
rest of the people in the world. We need a Secretary of the Interior who
understands that fact, and based upon her policies and statements Gale Norton
does not seem to do so.
I fully understand that the Senate is split
50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, and that if the confirmation votes are
cast strictly along partisan lines Dick Cheney will cast the tie-braking votes
and nominees like John Ashcroft and Gale Norton will be confirmed. For this
reason, I must ask you to consider strongly the usage of a filibuster to stop
these two nominations. (John Ashcroft was not averse to using this technique,
for example in 1995 when he filibustered President Clinton's nomination of
Henry Foster to Surgeon General.) I remind you yet again of the questionable
circumstances surrounding George Bush's ascension to the Presidency, and that
his agenda is in no way a mandate from the American people. John Ashcroft and
Gale Norton, if confirmed, could very well wreak enormous, and perhaps
irreversible, damage to our society and possibly even our entire planet, and we
cannot allow this to happen. These nominations must be stopped.
I will be happy to discuss my points in further
detail with you if you wish. Please feel free to contact me before or during
the confirmation hearings if I can be of any assistance, and also feel free to
share this letter with other Senators. I invite you to read, by the way,
Senator Boxer's eloquent letter on the Ashcroft nomination at:
http://boxer.senate.gov/newsroom/20010110_ashletter.html.
Sincerely,
Alan Hale
Cloudcroft
P.S. I've come across an interesting U.S. Supreme Court case, Barclay v. Florida (1983), where one Justice William Rehnquist, joined by one Justice Sandra O'Connor, wrote that it is not the business of the U.S. Supreme Court to tell the Florida Supreme Court how to interpret Florida law, unless its findings "are so unprincipled or arbitrary as to somehow violate the United States Constitution." I somehow don't believe that George Bush has a Constitutional right to receive more votes than Al Gore or to be appointed to the Presidency. Granted, I'm not an attorney, but there's a document, signed by hundreds of law professors from all over the country and from all across the political spectrum, and recently published in the New York Times, that condemns the U.S. Supreme Court's blatantly partisan decision in Bush v. Gore. As Justice John Paul Stevens (who, incidentally, signed a separate but concurring opinion in Barclay) wrote, "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."