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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Ronnie White was nominated in June 1997 by President Clinton to the Federal District Court of the Eastern District of Missouri, based in St. Louis.
Ashcroft might have opposed White on various grounds, such as his lack of experience. But Ashcroft himself was never a stickler for seasoning when it came to selecting judges. Back in 1985 the then-governor appointed his 30-something chief of staff to Missouri's Supreme Court. The number of days his aide had served as a judge before being sworn in to the state's highest court? Zero.
And initially, Ashcroft gave little indication that he'd block the appointment of his fellow Missourian. Both men owed their ascension in Missouri politics to a fortuitous tap on the shoulder. For Ashcroft, that tap came in 1973, when then-Gov. Christopher "Kit" Bond handpicked Ashcroft, who at the time was a political novice with one failed congressional run, to fill out the term of state auditor. Even with the aid of incumbency, Ashcroft lost his reelection bid as auditor. But he soon found a position in John Danforth's state attorney general's office.
In 1976 the clean-cut Ashcroft became Missouri's attorney general, a position he held until 1985 when he was sworn in as governor, succeeding his political patron, Bond, who was off the United States Senate. In 1994 Ashcroft captured 60 percent of the vote and easily won a seat of his own in the Senate.
White's political good fortune arrived in 1989, when Democratic officials needed to fill a state representative position after the incumbent quit midterm to accept a judgeship. White, a little-known attorney with the St. Louis Housing Authority, got the nod and served out the term. Representing a heavily Democratic district, he easily won reelection. Four years later White was tapped to become the city's general counsel.
The very next year Gov. Carnahan named White to the Missouri Court of Appeals in St. Louis. One year after that, Carnahan tapped White again, this time to the Missouri Supreme Court. In just six years White went from being a staffer at the St. Louis Housing Authority to sitting on the Missouri Supreme Court.
His rapid rise continued; one year after White reached the Supreme Court, Bill Clay, the congressman from St. Louis, recommended White for a federal judgeship, a nomination he received in 1997.
Like most women and minority nominees to the bench, White's name quietly languished for months in the Republican Senate through 1997 and 1998. By then Ashcroft's opposition to White was clear and most assumed he was the one holding up the process behind closed doors. But it wasn't until 1999 when the senator began his reelection run against Missouri's popular Gov. Carnahan that Ashcroft's anti-White rhetoric began to heat up.
In the end, Ashcroft's central argument was that White was "pro-criminal," a charge loaded with racial overtones. "It means prisons are full of blacks and if you get black folks on the court you're going to have anarchy," says Scruggs-Leftwich at the Black Forum. "Those are code words understood by African-Americans."
But Ashcroft admirers like Kris Kobach, a professor of constitutional law and legislation at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School, point out Ashcroft has supported 26 of 28 black judges nominated by Clinton, and as governor appointed the first black judge to an appellate court as well as appointed blacks to his Cabinet. "He trusts and takes advice from African-Americans," says Kobach. Other supporters note he backed the somewhat controversial Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, and Ashcroft himself denies the charge of racism, insisting "the same God judges all of us by the content of our character, not the color of our skin."
All that adds to the suspicion that this fight was really about something else. Could Ashcroft's real motivation for opposing White have been abortion? It would explain the animus Ashcroft held for the nominee, since the two crossed swords over the hot-button topic during the early '90s, when White was a state representative and Ashcroft the governor.
