David Sarasohn | The Nation

In four close Western races, the tribal population could tip the balance.

A famous indictment from a century ago aptly describes today’s corrupt legislative body.

We won the cold war without throwing out the right of
Americans to be secure in their homes, without throwing out the Fourth
Amendment.

The peeling-gilt Aladdin Theatre, in a working-class neighborhood across
the river from downtown Portland, generally draws rock acts a little too
funky or faded to fill the city's main showcase

When Attorney General John Ashcroft felt obliged to go out campaigning
in August in defense of the USA Patriot Act, his problem wasn't just
what people were saying about the act.

Tony Hall, just before leaving Congress in September, sat in his office
in Longworth House Office Building and thought of something that had
stuck with him since a trip to Appalachia.

When Bill Clinton signed the welfare overhaul in 1996, he and his supporters promised that its problems could be fixed later. One problem at the top of the list was the bill's savaging of the food stamp program, including sharp financial cuts and the removal of legal immigrants from its rolls. It wasn't fixed.

Six years and lots of empty plates later, there's a chance to make a considerable improvement--if the senators who see the need to fix it hold out. The 2002 farm bill, with a price tag of $75 billion, has passed both houses and is now in conference committee. The Senate version adds $8.9 billion to the nutrition budget, mostly for food stamps, and requalifies most legal immigrants, including all children and also the disabled--which would add an estimated 400,000 people. In determining general eligibility, it also takes a more realistic view of what poor people have to spend for shelter and to keep a car running. The House adds only a bit more than a third of that and, in the spirit of both the House leadership and the 1996 welfare bill, doesn't fix much.

The Senate pays for its nutrition increases by limiting the farm subsidies that can be paid to individual and corporate farmers. The House--and some senators--would rather keep the money flowing in the same old streams. "The problem is that the House doesn't like the payment limits," says Andy Fisher, spokesman for Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana. "You would think that members would be ashamed to take that position, but they're not."

It's one of the quirks of Washington that the major federal nutrition programs are part of the farm bill, written by legislators generally more interested in peanut price supports than peanut butter sandwiches. This year the bill was complicated by the large number of vulnerable Democratic senators from farm states--including Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Jean Carnahan of Missouri, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota--and Democratic nervousness about the effect of subsidy limits on their chances this fall. But, insists Wellstone, "There's no reason why we can't get it right on both family farms and nutrition."

The issue comes up as the need for food help is surging, spiked by the unemployment jump of the past year--especially in areas like Florida and Las Vegas, where the drop in airline traffic belted low-wage (and heavily immigrant) tourism workers. America's Second Harvest, the national alliance of food banks, issued a call to action in February to raise 365 million pounds of food. "When legal immigrants lost eligibility," says Doug O'Brien of Second Harvest, "it just shifted responsibility from the federal government to food banks." With the small difference that it's a lot harder for food banks to pay for it.

In January the Bush Administration--driven by the realities of hunger in Texas and by GOP interest in the Hispanic vote--came out for sharply relaxing the legal immigrant exclusion, giving the idea momentum. The National Governors Association, seeing hunger from closer up than Congress does, backs the Senate bill.

But in early March the Senate plan was hurt by the discovery that its bill would cost $6 billion more than expected and more than the budget allowed. Still, the senators on the conference committee include longtime nutrition advocates like Lugar and Patrick Leahy, and a high-ranking Senate staff member insists that the Senate side has so far refused--even after the revelation of its faulty accounting--to put nutrition cuts on the table. "I'm very hopeful," says Representative Eva Clayton, the first black woman to represent North Carolina and described by O'Brien as a "heroine" on hunger issues. "The House has not been very strong or aggressive on the issue of nutrition. We really need a little more pressure on us."

Senators--and all those who think it's a good idea to feed more hungry Americans--should turn up the heat on the nutrition conference committee.

Things are quieting down here in Terror Town, and it's probably been days since a talk-show host has denounced Portland's leaders as politically correct, latte-loving traitors. Although city leaders said that local police would not conduct federally ordered interviews with local Middle Eastern aliens, the interviews have pretty much been completed by federal agents. But the whole experience has left at least one moral: In today's legal climate, a law is a dangerous thing to cite.

The explosion began when assistant police chief Andrew Kirkland, acting as head while the chief was out of town, told a New York Times reporter that Portland police would not conduct the local interviews. Kirkland, who is African-American, denounced the idea as racial profiling, which he said he'd suffered from while growing up in Detroit: "I hated the police with a passion." In retrospect, it probably wasn't a great phrasing, and Portland's leaders have been derided by TV talking heads and have received 1,500 hostile e-mails from around the country. Republican Representative Lamar Smith, chairman of the House judiciary subcommittee on crime, has repeatedly threatened to cut off federal law-enforcement aid to the city.

Kirkland's stance was grounded on an assistant City Attorney's finding that several of the federally ordered questions violated a state law declaring, "No law enforcement agency...may collect or maintain information about the political, religious or social views, associations or activities of any individual, group, [or] association...unless such information directly relates to an investigation of criminal activities, and there are reasonable grounds to suspect the subject of the information is or may be involved in criminal conduct." In other words, Oregon police can't legally ask people who aren't suspected of anything questions about whether they've ever been to Afghanistan or the phone numbers of everybody they know.

Says Portland City Attorney Jeff Rogers, "We've been assured these people are not suspected of anything, but these questions are things you would ask people if they were suspected of something. If that were the case, these questions would be perfectly appropriate, but then other safeguards might come into play"--such as advising people of their Miranda rights.

Rogers, a Yale lawyer in a gray suit and with a clipped gray beard, has seen these issues, and national politics, from lots of different angles. His father, William Rogers, was Dwight Eisenhower's Attorney General and Richard Nixon's Secretary of State. He and his ex-wife were classmates of the Clintons at Yale Law School, and she spent the Clinton years as a US Attorney for Oregon. Earlier this year, he was bitterly abused on the same issue--from the left--after the City Council renewed its membership in a Joint Terrorism Task Force with the FBI. At a loud council session, activists charged that the city police would join the FBI in keeping files on people who weren't criminals, and Portland promised that it wouldn't.

So when the interviews came up, the city felt bound to keep the commitment. The Democratic state Attorney General eventually ruled that the city was wrong about the law. But a number of other officials, including the Republican chairman of the state house judiciary committee, concluded that Portland was probably right. And other Oregon cities with sizable immigrant populations quietly made it clear that they wouldn't be doing the interviews either. In fact, neither would police in Seattle, San Francisco and San Jose, who said that they would conduct such interviews only with actual criminal suspects. That leaves at least four major police forces open to Attorney General John Ashcroft's charge that anyone criticizing his policies is a terrorist pawn.

Some people in Portland think the city should have just gone along with the Justice Department, but Portland officials don't agree. "My City Attorney said I would be violating the law," said Mayor Vera Katz. "I swore to uphold the law and the Constitution. I'm not going to wink." Adds Katz, who landed in the United States in 1941 as a 7-year-old refugee from Germany, "I'm the only one who has gone through a war. I know what a war is like. You don't have to lecture me. You don't have to call me a traitor." And the Attorney General doesn't have to imply she's a terrorist accomplice.

The controversy has wound down, but Portland is still not exactly John Ashcroft's kind of town. During a visit to relatives in Portland recently, Senate Judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont called the interview process "a completely useless waste of law enforcement. I don't think it would accomplish much of anything." It seemed a stronger phrase than Leahy has ever dropped while chairing his Senate hearings in Washington. Possibly there's something in the air in Portland besides talk-radio.

In a week when Attorney General John Ashcroft was struggling with anthrax, investigating September 11 and overhauling his department, he still managed to take on another threat: the voters of Oregon. And the federal courts that have sustained them. Somehow, Ashcroft found time to throw out Oregon's assisted suicide law, which allows doctors to provide lethal drug doses, on request, to terminally ill patients near the end of life. The measure was passed by Oregon voters twice (the second time overwhelmingly) and survived federal court and Congressional challenges--but was targeted by antiabortion and religious right forces.

The law has been in effect four years without setting off the bloodbath darkly envisioned by its opponents. The greatest effect, say many, has been on terminal patients who don't choose assisted suicide but have benefited from the state's greater emphasis on treating pain in late-stage cancer and nerve disease. Still, Ashcroft proclaimed, "I hereby determine that assisting suicide is not a 'legitimate medical purpose'...and that prescribing, dispensing or administering federally controlled substances to assist suicide violates the Controlled Substances Act." To bolster his ruling, Ashcroft cited a recent Supreme Court ruling on medical marijuana that found that federal rules about controlled substances could not be abridged by states--despite states' traditional oversight of medical care.

But Ashcroft ignored the 1997 Supreme Court decision that directly addressed assisted suicide. That ruling declared that while there is no constitutional right to assisted suicide, the Constitution doesn't forbid it. Most of the Justices, in fact, called for testing the idea at the state level. "There is no reason to think the democratic process will not strike the proper balance between the interests of terminally ill, mentally competent individuals who would seek to end their suffering and the state's interests in protecting those who might seek to end life mistakenly or under pressure," wrote Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Ashcroft's selective citation may have contributed to the temporary injunction granted Oregon by US District Court Judge Robert Jones, blocking enforcement of the order until November 20. (On that day Jones extended the injunction for an additional five months.) At the time of his original decision Jones questioned Ashcroft's timing, noting that the legal memo backing the order was written in June. "July passed. August passed. September and October passed," pointed out Jones. "We're approaching the second week in November, and suddenly the Attorney General is issuing an edict for instant enforcement."

To the Bush Administration, assisted suicide is a second front in the abortion issue, where conservative allies can be supported at limited political cost. The National Right to Life Committee praised the decision, and the only White House comment on it, from Bush spokesman Ken Lisaius, was, "The President believes we must value life and protect the sanctity of life at all stages." Washington observers speculated that the policy was intended to soothe antiabortion forces, who wanted Bush to attack abortion rights more forcefully and were particularly disgruntled that he didn't completely shut down stem-cell research.

In Oregon, new US Attorney Michael Mosman insisted that he expected no prosecutions: "It's simply not true that there's going to be teams of DEA agents scouring the state." But Ashcroft ordered DEA administrator Asa Hutchinson--formerly a conservative GOP Congressman from Arkansas--to enforce the new policy nationally, especially in Oregon, and Hutchinson pledged to prevent the abuse of pain medication. Hutchinson's pledge should be seen in the context of the October 25 raid by some thirty DEA agents (in the midst of the anthrax scare) on the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center, a major provider of medical marijuana. That practice is supported by voters in California and seven other states but is rejected by the federal government--along with Oregon's voter-passed policy.

"If there's one thing I've heard over and over from Oregonians," said an unhappy Representative Greg Walden, the state's only House Republican, "it is this: When does my vote count?"

The Justice Department, in the middle of the country's greatest crisis in fifty years, at a time of constant calls for national unity, is still managing to pursue its right-wing social agenda, even against the clear voice of voters. After all, you have to stick to your priorities.

Some people just don't believe in getting over it.

In June, Charles Porter, 82--who left the House of Representatives just as George W. Bush was entering prep school--proposed a resolution to the Oregon Democratic Party calling for the impeachment of the five Supreme Court Justices who awarded the White House to Bush. The party wouldn't go quite that far. But it did officially resolve: "The Democratic Party of Oregon supports the immediate investigation of the behavior of the US Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, for decisions in December that led to Americans being denied their right to choose a President of the United States."

The Oregonians, the first (and so far only) state party to make such a statement, then bannered the resolution on their website (www.dpo.org). "I've got to tell you, I'm surprised," says Oregon state Democratic chairman Jim Edmunson. "There's been a large amount of interest. We've had e-mail, letters, contributions from people all over the country. It's like the movie Network: 'I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.'" The Oregon Democrats' website now includes hundreds of letters seconding their resolution, people writing "thank God some Democrats found some cojones" and, of course, "I refuse to get over it."

Paul Behrenndt, Democratic chairman of neighboring Washington, has sent the resolution around to other states. The Democratic committee of Ocean County, New Jersey, has posted the resolution on its website, as has Democrats.com, an organization of 25,000 party activists.

Where there hasn't been a response, concedes Edmunson, has been from any member of Congress. "The silence is deafening," he says. "The only people who haven't responded are the people who could do something about it." Edmunson's own Democratic Congressman, Peter DeFazio, former chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, sympathizes with the resolution but isn't about to go leaping to his feet in the House. "The Supreme Court is political. It's not a long stretch to see that they made a political decision. There are a number of right-wing political hacks who have been named to the Court, and they made a bad decision," says DeFazio. But, he says, "I can assure you that [House Speaker] Dennis Hastert, who won't even consider my proposal for a bipartisan commission to consider election reform, is not about to sanction a resolution to investigate the Supreme Court."

One prominent figure in the 2000 election--the one who finished third--also has doubts about an investigation. "They wouldn't be able to get across the separation of powers," says Ralph Nader. "The Court is not going to address subpoenas."

Still, even if it's unlikely that George W. Bush's White House will be repossessed, there are indications--for example, the attention paid to recent books on the Court's action by Vincent Bugliosi (based on an article in The Nation) and Alan Dershowitz, and an article in the Yale Law Journal--that the election that wouldn't end might still be alive in 2002, and even 2004. Stirring up the troops, instead of setting off a constitutional crisis, seems to be about what Edmunson expects. "This was just a glorious middle finger in the wind," says Edmunson. "The best thing you can do with your middle finger sometimes is poke someone in the eye with it."