ONE DOWN….

Oh, Lord, it’s started already.

George Bush has already run into trouble with two of his nominees for top Cabinet posts. One, Secretary of Labor nominee Linda Chavez, stepped in deep guacamole over questions about a Guatemalan woman who was living in Chavez’ home while just happening to be in this country illegally. This lady, name of Marta Mercado, apparently did "odd jobs" for Chavez and received undisclosed sums of money from her. But, insists Chavez, Mercado was not an employee.

One does have to wonder if somebody who doesn’t define "employee" as "someone who does work for me and gets money" really has what it takes to be Secretary of Labor. Maybe Chavez thought of Mercado as a sort of wacky sidekick. We may never know, because Chavez took a dive and withdrew her nomination , even as Dubbya was expressing "total confidence" in his nominee. (In Washingtonspeak, "total confidence" translates as "Vaya Con Dios, baby. Write when you find work." )

It’s probably going to be more of a fight over former Missouri Senator John Ashcroft. Some of the charges against Ashcroft are a bit silly. For example, Ashcroft has been criticized for writing a letter to a Southern magazine that has, let us say, a rather rosy view of conditions in the Old South. The gripe is that he referred to Confederate generals as "men of honor". Note that this is not something with which I disagree. In the sense of loving their country and being willing to die for it, they were indeed men of honor. But try to imagine the outcry if Ashcroft had written to a German or Japanese rag and described Erwin Rommel or Admiral Yamamoto as "men of honor." Again, for their time and place, they undoubtedly were. Don’t be all surprised, however, when people take umbrage at the description. In fact, I think I hear some veterans in my yard right now. Hope they at least got the tar and feathers warm this time.

Ashcroft also drew the ire of the African-American community for torpedoing the federal-court nomination of judge Ronnie White, a black Missouri Supreme Court justice who Ashcroft described as "soft on crime" and a zealot against the death penalty, despite White’s voting to uphold 41 of the death penalty cases brought before him. Many African-Americans mobilized against Ashcroft at that point, and some credit the trashing of Ronnie White as the real reason Ashcroft couldn’t beat a dead man in the Missouri Senate election.

The evidence for Ashcroft-as-racist, however, is far from clear. Missouri politicians have noted Ashcroft has supported 26 of 28 black judges nominated by Clinton, and as governor appointed the first black judge to an appellate court. He also backed the controversial Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday.

What really worries some people about Ashcroft, however, is his position on abortion. I have to confess, I’m one of those people. Ashcroft, a former Governor so strictly religious that he refused to dance at his own inaugural ball, has been vocal in his support for a constitutional amendment that would outlaw abortions, including in instances of rape and incest. He’s also led the fight against so-called "partial-birth abortions," a rarely-used procedure whose major distinction from regular abortions is that, well, it’s WAY ickier, if you can imagine.

Ashcroft supporters get all indignant about any suggestion that the nominee might not, for example, strongly enforce laws protecting abortion clinics and the people who work in them. "It’s outrageous," huffed Arizona senator John Kyl. ``It's appropriate to ask the attorney general nominee, `Will you enforce the laws properly?' But to create innuendo or insinuate that there are reasons to believe he won't, I think, is inappropriate.''

It’s naïve, however, to ignore the fact that every law enforcement officer, from the guy walking the beat to the head of the Justice Department, decides where to allocate resources. That means deciding which crimes to go after vigorously and where to turn a blind eye. Remember the "Andy Griffith" episode where Barney enforced every law, no matter how minor, and ended up putting the mayor in jail? The whole thing was funny because Barney lost sight of a basic principle of law enforcement: No cop can enforce all the laws. So it’s a legitimate question as to whether the nation’s top cop is going to get all excited over prosecuting the type of people who "…use physical obstruction to interfere with a persons access to a reproductive health service," in the words of one federal law.

These are fair questions. In fact, they’re the sort of questions Ashcroft asked Ronnie White during White’s failed confirmation: "Justice White," he asked, "if the Supreme Court were to uphold a federal partial birth abortion ban as constitutional, would you have any difficulty in applying a decision of the Supreme Court which upheld such a law?" White said he would not. White still lost, and a number of observers believe that it was White’s pro-choice politics, not some manufactured "softness" on crime, that really turned Ashcroft against him. If Ashcroft loses over the same type of question, it will truly be what goes around coming around.

COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.