In My Opinion: Hard Right

It didn’t take long for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to signal the character and attitude of their administration — hardline conservative, and pugnacious. Their cabinet appointments spell it out. While at least one appointee understands and respects unions and the collective bargaining process — former Alcoa chairman Paul O’Neill has served with me as co-chair of the Collective Bargaining Forum for several years — he’s not at the Labor Department, but instead at Treasury.

Another supports affirmative action for minorities — that’s Secretary of State Colin Powell.

And there is even one who favors a woman’s right to reproductive choice, Christine Whitman, new head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

They are all safely placed in jobs where their moderate beliefs (shared by the American mainstream) can’t do any harm from the far-right point of view.

But when it came to the posts that have the responsibility for protecting the rights of women, minorities and working people in general, it would be hard to imagine anyone worse than Linda Chavez at Labor and John Ashcroft at Justice.

Fortunately, Chavez was forced to withdraw when it came to light that she lied to the FBI and the Bush transition team regarding the “nanny question.”

But it’s the thought that counts. The new administration was perfectly happy to appoint a Labor secretary who, as a conservative columnist for many years, has openly expressed hostility toward labor unions and toward workers’ rights as union members. “Union members are hardly representative of the American working public,” she stated.

Chavez opposes affirmative action, the Family and Medical Leave Act, equal pay for women — she has ridiculed the notion of a “glass ceiling” — the minimum wage, which she regards as a “Marxist” invention, prescription drug benefits for Medicare recipients, and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Bush-Cheney team’s first choice for Labor secretary drew immediate opposition from organized labor, of course, as well as from women’s, senior citizens’, disabled Americans’ and civil rights advocacy organizations, including Hispanic groups, despite her Mexican heritage.

The undoing of Chavez had nothing to do with the fact that she was completely unqualified for the job and an inappropriate choice. Her past off-the-books employment of an undocumented Guatemalan housekeeper proved an embarrassment to Bush and made her expendable.

In naming a new candidate at Labor, Bush-Cheney made a less controversial choice in Elaine Chao (see page 10), no doubt because their candidate for attorney general was also drawing fire from several quarters.

It’s ironic that Linda Chavez had petulantly invoked the “politics of personal destruction” as she withdrew her nomination. Sen. John Ashcroft, the nominee for attorney general, would go on to be hammered at his confirmation hearing for elevating the art of character assassination to new levels.

It has become most clear that Sen. Ashcroft shamelessly lied and muddied the reputation of Ronnie White, an African-American Missouri supreme court justice, in engineering the defeat of Mr. White’s nomination for a federal judgeship in 1999. By falsely branding the judge “pro-criminal,” Ashcroft was playing politics by bolstering his own tough-on-crime stance in his Senate race against the late Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan.

So much for “integrity,” the word Bush kept stressing when he announced the Ashcroft nomination.

A more appropriate word for Ashcroft might be bigotry. A fervent opponent of anything having to do with gay rights, Ashcroft led the fight to block another appointment for a minor ambassadorship solely because the man, a distinguished law school dean, was a homosexual.

People have been reluctant to call Ashcroft an out and out racist, but there are some troubling matters in his background.

Ashcroft opposed court-ordered desegregation as attorney general and as governor of Missouri. He has praised a neo-Confederate magazine that defends southern slavery and which sells T-shirts celebrating the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He accepted an honorary degree from the notoriously discriminatory Bob Jones University.

Put all this together with Ashcroft’s extreme right-wing views on women’s reproductive rights, affirmative action, separation of church and state, assault weapon ownership, hate crimes laws, equal pay for equal work, and environmental protections and you have someone close to the extreme fringe.

As I write this, Ashcroft’s confirmation hearing is still going on and he is expected to prevail. Regardless, he is supremely unsuitable to head the department most responsible for protecting American workers and minority groups from abuse and discrimination.

Given the closeness of the presidential race and the evenly divided Congress, some people thought President Bush might be inclined to build bridges toward those who opposed him. They were wrong. Some expected the worst, and unfortunately, they were correct.

It’s time to button our chin straps.

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