Posted on: Thursday, April 18, 2002

EDITORIAL
Ashcroft uncomfortable with fundamental rights

A new sport, for those with time on their hands, is predicting which Bush Cabinet member will be the first to leave, one way or the other. The front-runners:

• None other than Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was sent to the Middle East to demand a cease-fire and came back agreeing that the Israeli offensive made sense. The hawks in Bush's Defense Department have tried to undercut Powell from Day One.

• Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who broke ranks with Bush over the decision to protect the U.S. steel industry from competition from lower-cost steel from Korea, Japan, China and elsewhere.

• Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman, who promised Bush would follow through on his campaign pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions — just before Bush, in a big way, broke that pledge. In March, the EPA's enforcement chief quit, charging his unit is being gutted.

• Attorney General John Ashcroft, who clearly sees problems with all sorts of civil liberties, except the right to bear arms.

Two examples occurred just this week, as Ashcroft vowed to continue to oppose Oregon's assisted-suicide law even though a federal judge said he had no business interfering with a decision made "not once, but twice" by Oregon's voters.

And he condemned a sensible — if sensitive — ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court striking down a federal ban on "virtual" child pornography. The court held the law was so broad that it would discourage artistic expression like Shakespeare's classic about the two young lovers, Romeo and Juliet, or films like "American Beauty," "Traffic" and "Lolita."

Ashcroft argues that even computer-generated images might prompt pedophiles to molest children, and sometimes that might be true. But, wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the 6-3 majority opinion, "The mere tendency of speech to encourage unlawful acts is not a sufficient reason for banning it."

Ashcroft complains that the ruling will make his law enforcement job more difficult. Law enforcement is naturally more difficult in a liberal democracy, where, thankfully, a variety of rights are protected.

It's back to the drawing board for Congress to find a constitutional way to better protect real children from pornographers — without much help from Ashcroft.

So which Cabinet member will be first to leave?

Our guess is that it won't be Ashcroft.