Capitol Hill Blue: Civil Rights Groups Challenge Ashcroft
Selection, “demanding that Democratic senators abandon the tradition of supporting former colleagues
and vote against the nomination.” Ashcroft (whose recent distinction, you’ll recall, was to lose his
reelection bid for his Missouri Senate seat to an opponent who had been killed in a plane crash before
the election) “has drawn opposition for his anti-abortion views and for leading a drive to defeat the
nomination of a black Missouri Supreme Court judge, Ronnie White, to the federal bench.”

In a
related story, a researcher in Ashcroft’s home state finds that he has “…actively cultivated <a href=”
http://www.accuracy.org/new.htm”>ties to white supremacists and extreme hate groups.” John Hickey,
executive director of the Missouri Citizen Education Fund, singles out Ashcroft’s praise of the quarterly
Southern Partisan, which the New Republic characterizes as the “leading journal of the neo-
Confederacy movement,” for over 20 years serving up “a gumbo of racist apologies.”