Dear Senator Dianne Feinstein:

I am a Missourian living in California. I moved here a year and a half ago. Over the last six years I have been witness to how ideologically divisive my former Senator, John Ashcroft, has been. He showed incredible insensitivity and a strong ability to wreck havoc with nominee after nominee during his six years in the Senate. One particularly striking episode was his successful derailment of Justice Ronnie White to the federal bench. This episode was, by far, one of the worst episodes of egregious name-calling and personal destruction ever witnessed by the Senate.

Missouri is a great state. I’m glad to be able to call it home. Missouri is a conservative state in many respects. Missouri rarely, if ever, votes someone out of office. However, after we Missourians watched our Senator Ashcroft move further and further towards the right-wing, taking personal and partisan attacks to new levels of extreme, and distancing himself from the real needs of his constituents, we proudly voted him out of office. We did so, even though our nominee, the late Governor Mel Carnahan, died three weeks before the election. We voted Senator Ashcroft out of office because he was simply too partisan and right-wing for our state.

In that vein, I ask you the following questions: If John Ashcroft is too conservative for Missouri, how can he be an appropriate representative as the nation’s Attorney General? And why should Senators vote to confirm John Ashcroft to a higher office, when the will of the voters of the state of Missouri was for him to leave office? I ask that you use your leadership on the Senate Judiciary Committee to voice opposition to John Ashcroft’s nomination and I urge you to vote against his confirmation to U.S. Attorney General.