Posted on 08/15/2002 2:21:39 PM PDT by Washingtonian
Ashcroft overrun by liberals
August 15, 2002
BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
How is it that John Ashcroft's hard-line Justice Department flinches like a gun controller at the thought of arming airline pilots? That tendency can be traced to a career bureaucrat named Sarah Hart, brought into the Justice Department a year ago by Ashcroft.
Hart not only has attacked guns in the cockpit but also has expressed affection for the COPS program, Bill Clinton's federal subsidy for local police forces that the Bush administration wants to terminate. If Hart shares Clintonian ideals, she has found plenty of company at a Justice Department where holdovers abound.
When Ashcroft entered the attorney general's office after a brutal Senate confirmation process, a veteran of previous Republican administrations told me Ashcroft's immediate test would be how he staffed his department. From conservatives, Ashcroft gets an ''A'' for high-level appointments and an ''F'' for the mid-level bureaucracy.
Ashcroft's most criticized senior bureaucrats:
Lawrence A. Greenfeld, director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics: Starting as a probation officer in Fairfax County, Va., 33 years ago, he joined the Justice Department in 1976 and the bureau in 1982. He was its principal deputy director under President Clinton and was promoted to director by President Bush. He is viewed by conservatives as supporting COPS and other Clinton programs.
Michael Katz, deputy assistant attorney general in the Antitrust Division: A University of California at Berkeley professor starting in 1987, he became chief economist--and staunch regulator--at the Federal Communications Commission in 1994. He next became chief economist at Clinton's Antitrust Division, supervising its economic analysis as it attacked Microsoft. Ashcroft has retained him in that strategic position.
Sarah V. Hart, director of the National Institute of Justice: A Philadelphia prosecutor for 16 years, she became chief counsel of Pennsylvania's Department of Corrections in 1995. Since joining Ashcroft's Justice Department, conservatives complain, Hart has done nothing to reduce NIJ funding for left-wing academic institutions.
Hart particularly distresses conservatives. When Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona planned a critical study of COPS, he could not get help from Justice because Hart indicated support for the program. Kyl's staffers did not even think it worthwhile to contact Greenfeld, who had the numbers at hand but was known as a COPS booster.
When Congress passed its transportation security act last December, it required Hart's agency to report any alternatives in airline cockpits to stun guns or other non-lethal weapons. According to Justice sources, she recommended only ''passive'' behavior by pilots. Since she has publicly suggested that stun guns may be ''impractical,'' Hart in effect is calling for pilot passivity in the wake of the terrorist attacks.
A draft report to the Senate by the General Accounting Office, the congressional investigative arm, cites Hart as a source for objection to guns in the cockpit. ''Arming pilots,'' says the GAO draft, ''would introduce 10,000-100,000 guns into society, contradicting other efforts to discourage the number of firearms in the population.'' That aligns a Bush presidential appointee with the gun-controllers. When my office called her, Hart pleaded she was in the midst of a meeting and hung up the phone.
Hart had the power to stop federal financing for an anti-gun study by the National Academy of Sciences, which is expected to be issued just in time for the 2004 presidential election campaign. She did not. John Lott, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has called this a one-sided study with a foregone conclusion conceived by the Clinton administration.
Beneath the level of Hart, Katz and Greenfeld, platoons of liberals infest the Justice Department. I have previously reported that Stuart Gibson, a lawyer in Justice's Tax Division, is a liberal political activist elected to office in the Virginia suburbs. He was identified as lead litigator publicly revealing a tax shelter used by William Simon, Republican candidate for governor of California. How many more liberals pursue their agendas inside John Ashcroft's Justice Department is anybody's guess.
1) Order them to be team players or, barring that,
2) Fire these people and hire new ones who will be team players.
I am tired of people saying that liberal or stupid policies (but I repeat myself) can't be stopped within the Executive Branch. This is patent nonsense. You either fire someone who isn't with the program, or you reassign them to the worst duty imaginable and put someone to your liking in their former position.
You can see that for yourself by reading Dinh's recent speech to the DC Bar Association at this link.
The speech opens with a bad premise: "Fundamental to the rule of law is the concept of ordered liberty." And that premise leads Dinh to several dialectic conclusions that threaten American freedom as we know it.
I wonder about the motives behind these kind of articles.
This really ticks me off. Sarah needs to be re-assigned. Imagine if Sarah was a Conservative in a liberal administration - she would be gone in a heartbeat.
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