[+/-] Ashcroft's record of incompetence

From the time he took the oath of office as Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft declared war on the Constitution and freedom as we know it in the United States.

1. Ashcroft showed his true colors from day one, ordering drapes for nude statues in the Justice Building of Washington, and setting up a "large-scale campaign against pornography," with hundreds of FBI agents, lawyers and researchers gobbling up millions of dollars in taxpayer funds. (To date, the Justice Department has brought 43 cases to trial - and lost every one.)
   
   
2. As Missouri attorney general, Ashcroft often put his own extremist beliefs over the law, threatening to prosecute business who opened on Sunday even after a statewide voter referendum overturned the state's archaic "blue laws" that forced retail establishments to close on the Seventh Day. "God's will supersedes the laws of man," Ashcroft declared at the time. The Supreme Court of Missouri disagreed and forced him to cease and desist. It would be the first of many clashes between Ashcroft and the courts and the courts always won.
   
   
3. Ashcroft also broke the law. Last December the Federal Election Commission slapped Ashcroft’s failed US Senate Campaign (the one where he lost re-election to a dead guy) with a $37,000 fine for “at least four violations of federal campaign law.”
   
   
4. Ashcroft compiled a horrendous record on civil rights, opposing outright desegregation of schools in St. Louis and laws granted equal rights to women and minorities.
   
   
5. Ashcroft authored much of the USA Patriot Act, a rights-robbing set of laws that ignored basic freedoms of the Constitution and gave the Federal Government broad powers to hold American citizens without cause, deny them right to counsel and wiretap any person almost at will.
   
   
6. All of his high-profile arrests of so-called terrorists have stalled or been tossed out. Ashcroft is 0 for 5000 on terror convictions. Legal scholars say the Justice Department under Ashcroft is "inept" and unable to build cases against those in custody because they "don't know the basics of building a case."

While this anti-humanist tyrant is gone, the tyranny of his actions remain as a constant threat to the freedoms we once accepted as a guarantee in this country.