Bush Nominates Ashcroft, Thompson to Cabinet

By Dave Andrusko

Refusing to buckle under to pro-abortion threats, President- elect George W. Bush has nominated pro-lifers to important cabinet positions, including attorney general and secretary of health and human services.

Working hand in glove with major newspapers, pro-abortionists are already speaking in apocalyptic terms.Within two weeks of the December 22 selection of pro-life Missouri Sen. John Ashcroft to be attorney general, they were already likening their offensive to the all-out war launched in 1987 that successfully derailed President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.

Pro-life Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson's selection to be secretary of health and human services has been pummeled by many of the same sources.

Kate Michelman, president of NARAL, offered the consensus view of the professional pro-abortion organizations. "Not since Ed Meese [Ronald Reagan's attorney general] would the U.S. have an attorney general as hostile to a woman's right to choose," she said. "President-elect Bush's moderate demeanor during the campaign was a facade to hide his anti-choice views."

Taking the occasion of Thompson's subsequent December 29 nomination to hammer both nominees, Michelman warned that President-elect Bush "has laid the gauntlet down on the two most critical nominations when it comes to women's reproductive rights."

Michelman's assessment was echoed by Vicki Saporta, executive director of the National Abortion Federation. "Americans should be alarmed that George W. Bush has chosen two men with extreme anti-choice positions to head the two agencies that have the most direct impact on women's reproductive health care," she said.

The truth, of course, is that both Sen. Ashcroft and Gov. Thompson are distinguished public servants with very impressive credentials. Ashcroft's resume amply qualifies him for the job of the nation's top legal officer. As attorney general he would head the 100,000-employee Justice Department that includes the network of U.S. attorney's offices nationwide.

Ashcroft served two years as Missouri's state auditor, followed by eight years as the state's attorney general, and then as governor from 1985 to 1993. He succeeded John Danford to the U.S. Senate in 1995 and was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was a cosponsor of the original Senate bill to ban partial-birth abortions.

However, in a bizarre twist that proves that truth is stranger than fiction, Sen. Ashcroft lost his re-election bid last November to pro-abortion Missouri governor Mel Carnahan, whose name remained on the ballot even though he had died in a plane crash. The electorate understood that Carnahan's widow, Jean, would serve in his place, and in an outpouring of sympathy, narrowly elected the inexperienced Mrs. Carnahan, who had never held public office. Sen. Ashcroft graciously refused to contest the highly unusual outcome.

Gov. Thompson, in his fourth term, is the nation's longest- serving governor. Thompson was 25 when he first won a seat in the Wisconsin legislature in 1966. By 1973 he had risen to assistant assembly minority leader. Eight years later his party chose him to be assembly minority leader.
Thompson has dominated the Wisconsin political landscape since 1986, when he won his first gubernatorial contest. During his tenure, he signed numerous pro-life bills into law, including a ban on partial-birth abortions, a parental involvement law, an unborn victims of violence law, and a woman's right-to-know law.

As head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Thompson will be Mr. Bush's primary advisor on national health care issues. His areas of responsibility include the Medicare and Medicaid programs and the National Institutes of Health.

At the press conference where his nomination was announced by Mr. Bush, Thompson fielded a question about an abortion-related issue. His response was "I am a pro-life governor."

According to one partisan who spoke to the Washington Post, whether pro-abortionists are able to defeat Ashcroft and/or Thompson, the process of reassembling the kind of coalition that subverted Judge Bork 14 years ago still is a very useful "warm-up for the playoffs." By that was meant judicial appointments.

The Post reported, "Even before Bush announced the selection of Ashcroft," pro-abortion organizations and other "liberal advocacy groups" had "begun to mobilize for what they expect will be major judicial confirmation fights."

According to the Post, however, there are additional benefits from trying to torpedo the nominations. The confirmation process can "lay the political groundwork for the mid-term elections" and " more immediate, they can serve as a vehicle to help raise funds for the party and outside groups."

Although it is probably merely a pose, many news accounts took the position that it was a surprise that Bush actually selected nominees who would help him enact the agenda on which he had campaigned. One account, which seemed to half-admire his consistency, wrote that "President-elect Bush is constructing a Cabinet of hard-nosed pros whose mission is to help make his campaign promises come true."