U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft Resigns

andyring writes "In a move that will undoubtedly make many /. readers jump for joy (although perhaps not myself), Attorney General John Ashcroft announced he will resign, according to multiple news sources. While many here dislike him, others have more favorable opinions of him. He became the point man on the USA Patriot Act, which typically ignites harsh opinions on both sides of the aisle." Reader cnsc1rtr , referring to the AP's version of the story, writes "He gave Bush a five-page, handwritten letter in which he stated, 'The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved.'"

Comments

Will Bush appoint a more conservative replacement?

[mind21_98]

Is it possible that Bush will appoint a more conservative replacement for Ashcroft? That's been the danger, especially since up to four Supreme Court positions may open up this term. How would a more conservative Attorney General affect the US?

As well as secure us from sex, drugs and P2P

[isolation]

Thank God. I wish Ashcroft could read this.

I am a Christain and a Conservative and I am glad to see him gone. His record on states rights vs federal law proves that the current administration cares nothing about the will of the people and only about the power of Federal law. I dont want the state coming in and telling me what I can and can't put in to my body or who I can have sex with. I could just see this guy dragging homosexuals in if the amendment had passed. I dont want the state to come in to my marrage or a gay marrage anymore than I want the state to come in to my relationship with God.

This guy got his rocks off dragging people in to court over matters that should never have been law in the first place.

See you around John.....

Re:Ashcroft

[danheskett]

It's not trendy to dissent on the Patriot Act around here, but probably a solid 90% of the bill accomplished SORELY needed reforms.

There were literally hundreds of pathetic attempts to seperate government agencies for a no good reason.

The rest of the bill that you hear so much about is what really burns most civil libertarians.

Everyone should be asked to read the whole act at least once in their lives. Most people would be surprised how much stuff the government *couldn't* do that just made sense before hand.

Re:Good Riddance

[Trurl's Machine]

You are most certainly wrong. I'm not even sure if Palmer was the worst one. With all due (dis)respect to Mr Ashcroft, nothing even remotely like Palmer Raids happened during his tenure. Palmer was the key factor behind the 1917 and 1918 "Espionage Act" and "Sedition Act", comparing to which Patriot Act is a teddy bear. According to this law, an elected member of Congress was refused a seat because of his pacifist views - and sentenced to 20 years of prison just because he didn't believe that America should join the slaughter of World War I (more on Victor Berger you can find here. The Palmer Raids themselves rendered the question of American "constitutional rights" simply irrelevant - it appeared there were none of them. To quote Wikipedia:

Starting on November 7, 1919, Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations without warrants, concentrating on foreigners. They arrested over 10,000 people (...) In January, 1920, another 6,000 were arrested, mostly members of the anarcho-syndicalist union Industrial Workers of the World. During one of the raids, more than 4,000 Communists were rounded up in a single night. All foreign aliens caught were deported.

The public reaction to these raids was favorable, stirring up a storm of anti-communist sentiment. In a murder eerily similar to the lynching of Germans during World War I, a group of young men in Centralia, Washington hanged a radical from a railway bridge. The coroner's report stated that the communist "jumped off with a rope around his neck and then shot himself full of holes." For most of 1919, the public seemed to side with Palmer.

I don't want to defend Bush & Ashcroft, but it's simply naive to see them as "the worst that happened". No, it's not the worst in American history. When you look on the whole American history it turns out that only the post-WWII period really resembles contemporary understanding of constitutional democracy (and even then there were authoritarian hiccups of McCarthyism or Watergate).

Re:Stalking horse

[Rei]

Wait, are you going to pretend that he *hasn't* been one of the most "activist" attorney generals in recent history? From trying to overturn Oregon's ballot-initiative-created assisted suicide law, to doing the same sort of thing with California's medical marijuana law, to dredging up an obscure 1872 law to bring a case against a nonviolent greenpeace protest 15 months after the fact, to coming up with the "secret detention/secret trials" nonsense, to pretending to be the Supreme Court in declaring that the justice department has no authority over most cases of gun control regulation due to the second amendment, to *drafting*, using USDOJ resources the USA-PATRIOT Act, and then using government funds to go on a *cross-country tour* to promote it?

He's not just a postmodern bureaucrat. He's a bloody nihilist.