Something Stinks in Missouri

Something Stinks in Missouri
by Radley Balko

BILL CLINTON KNOWS political opportunity when he sees it. He saw in Missouri a swing state in which normally reliable black voters were becoming a little too cozy with the Republicans. In the 1998 elections, for instance, local NAACP chairman Charles Mischeaux was making campaign commercials for GOP Senate incumbent Kit Bond. James DeClue, another local NAACP official, also supported Bond over his opponent, state Attorney General Jay Nixon.

Not even the vile, deplorable radio ads Democrats ran on black radio stations, ads which implicitly accused Republicans of supporting church burnings and lynchings, could prevent the unorthodox alliance that vaulted Bond from vulnerable incumbent to breezy victory on election night.

So when the US Senate last week voted down the nomination of Missouri Supreme Court Justice Ronnie White (who's black) for a federal judgeship, President Clinton pounced. He implied, rather emphatically, that White's defeat was racially charged, essentially that so long as Republicans run the Senate, black people aren't likely to become judges. In the process, President Clinton probably delivered Missouri's black vote back to the Democrats at the ninety percent rate with which they're comfortable.

Much as one is inclined to become incensed at Clinton's rhetoric, Republicans have no one to blame but themselves.

For the record, Judge White was not voted down because he's black. Most senators who voted against him were unaware of his ethnicity (as well they should not have been). And of the twenty-one federal judgeships approved by the Senate this year, four have been Hispanic, one was black and four were female.

The point man for White's defeat was Missouri Senator John Ashcroft. As governor of Missouri, Ashcroft appointed the fist black to a major judgeship in western Missouri and the first female to the Missouri state Supreme Court. He's also voted to confirm over seventy minority and female judicial nominees in his time in the US Senate. John Ashcroft's record is not that of a man averse to non-white, non-male judges.

Republicans in the Senate say they denied White because he's "soft on criminals," and, in particular, that he's reluctant to support the death penalty. That's not right either. White has upheld over forty death sentences during his stay on the Missouri Supreme Court. In six of those, he wrote the opinion. As St. Louis columnist Ray Hartman notes, four of Ashcroft's own appointees have overturned more death sentences than Justice White.

So why was White denied? Well, the Senate denied him because both of Missouri's Senators opposed the nomination. And, as radio host Charles Jaco noted, the US Senate has never confirmed a judge over the objection of both of his home state Senators. It's one of those courtesies senators are always extending to one another.

The question then becomes, why did Senators Ashcroft and Bond oppose the nomination? The answer of course is politics.

Senator Ashcoft faces a tough re-election campaign next year against Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan. Ashcroft, like most of Missouri, is a staunch death penalty supporter. Governor Carnahan took heat some months back for commuting a death sentence at the bequest of then visiting Pope John Paul II. Justice White is a Carnahan appointee. Ashcroft's strategy? Paint White as a soft-on-crime Carnahan appointee. Put the two high-profile issues together, and he's got great fodder for October campaign commercials.

But as is often the case in politics, actual motivation isn't nearly as important as apparent motivation. And to blacks in Missouri, the apparent motivation here wasn't politics, it was race.

Particularly frustrating to them was the shady shift of Senator Bond, apparently to help out Ashcroft.

At White's confirmation hearings in the spring of 1998, Senator Bond said, "I believe Judge White has the necessary qualifications and character traits for this most important job." When introducing White to the judiciary committee, Bond said, "I urge this committee to act favorably on this nomination."

They did. They voted Justice White's nomination on to the floor of the Senate.

And Bond was later re-elected.

But last week, with fellow Republican Ashcroft's re-election issue on the line, Bond changed his tune, as did Senators Orin Hatch, Arlen Specter and Strom Thumond. All voted for White in committee last spring, all voted against him on the floor last week.

The result? White became the first judge since Robert Bork to be voted down by the full body of the US Senate. He was embarrassed publicly, and another ugly racial imbroglio ensued.

Missouri's black activists are livid. St. Louis' Riverfront Times quoted the Rev. Earl Nance, a local civil rights activist who supported Bond, on the steps of a courthouse with other black leaders, as saying, "the...lesson is that...when you lay down with snakes, you're going to get bit."

Bond said he backed White's nomination. Several black Missourans correspondingly backed Bond's candidacy. Then he lied to them. Now all Republicans are "snakes."

As for Ashcroft, black leaders never expected much from him to begin with. Ashcroft took fire in preceding months for granting an interview to the Southern Quarterly, a publication that purports to preserve the glory of the Confederacy and, as Hartmann writes, still refers to blacks as negroes. Not necessarily indicative of a racist, but not the most prudent of political endeavors.

Black leaders in Missouri took a chance on a Republican. It would be a welcome change and healthy for American politics if black leaders took similar chances from time to time in jurisdictions across the country.

Thanks to John Ashcroft and Kit Bond, that's probably not going to happen.

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