1/16/01 2:25 p.m.
Bigots vs. Ashcroft
A legal reporter smears the A.G. nominee.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru

egal Times scribe Tony Mauro wants to know: “Can a deeply religious person be attorney general?” What an interesting question! And what a bigoted one!

Yet Mauro asks it anyway, in a USA Today op-ed. Mauro continues: “If Ashcroft’s view [that ‘we have no king but Jesus’] leads him to think that ours is a Christian nation, or that only Christians have the right answers to the nation’s problems, then indeed his vision is too narrow to take the job of attorney general.” It is worth noting that Mauro provides no evidence that Ashcroft does in fact think these things. He merely suspects that there’s a chance Ashcroft does, and therefore “the Senate needs to explore these questions fully, even if it necessitates an intrusion into the usually private domain of a person’s religious beliefs.”

Yesterday on NRO, Michael Novak noted the long conservative tradition of making a distinction between law and morality. He also pointed out that liberals “demand a religious test for public office, and the test they propose is simple: No one in public office is allowed to take religion seriously, or to apply it to reality, or to allow it to shape their views. The upshot of this test is that all officers of the government of the United States ought to be effective or practical atheists.”

It is difficult to imagine Mauro asking his question if Ashcroft were Catholic or Jewish. Let’s see how he might formulate it: “Can a profoundly Catholic person be attorney general?” Or: “Can a committed Jewish person be attorney general?”

We wonder if the editors at USA Today would entertain these sorts of doubts.

Pardon Me
If President Clinton is indicted, 49 percent of the public believes it would be a “good thing” to pardon him, versus 38 percent thinking it would be a “bad thing,” according to a Newsweek poll.