As the United States Senate prepares to take up the nomination of John Ashcroft for U.S. Attorney General, the unlamented specter haunting its chamber is none other than Jefferson Davis. The long-deceased president of the old Confederacy is regarded as a hero by the former Senator from Missouri, whose praise of such figures—and whose links to right-wing extremists in his home state and elsewhere—raises serious doubts regarding his fitness to become the nation’s highest law-enforcement officer.

By selecting Mr. Ashcroft to take over that office, George W. Bush has re-opened a debate that ought to have been settled in 1865. There are ample valid reasons to oppose Mr. Ashcroft, including his hard-line position on abortion rights, his servility to the gun lobby and his consistently poor record on civil liberties.

What cuts most deeply, however, is Mr. Ashcroft’s apparent endorsement of the defeated Southern slavocracy, with all that necessarily implies about his true attitudes toward black Americans and other minorities.

According to recent reports in the Associated Press and elsewhere, Mr. Ashcroft gave an interview in 1998 to the Southern Partisan, a “neo-Confederate” publication that regularly vilifies Abraham Lincoln as a “tyrant.” He praised its sinister brand of nostalgia, saying that the magazine “helps set the record straight” by “defending Southern patriots” like Davis and Robert E. Lee. “We’ve all got to stand up and speak in this respect or else we’ll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor, to some perverted agenda,” Mr. Ashcroft went on. (Presumably the slaveholders were the “compassionate conservatives” of their era.)

Those quotes date back to when the unique distinction of being defeated for re-election by a dead man was still far in Mr. Ashcroft’s future. He was preening himself as a potential Presidential candidate and recruiting the die-hard partisans of Dixie for a Christian Right Presidential crusade.

Today he continues to be held in the highest esteem by the racist far right, notably including the Council of Conservative Citizens, a neo-Confederate outfit that maintains its national headquarters in St. Louis. Back when Mr. Ashcroft was considering a Presidential campaign, the C.C.C.’s  national leader, Gordon Baum, said publicly that next to Pat Buchanan, the Senator from Missouri was the group’s favorite contender.

Now Mr. Baum and his followers are rejoicing at the notion that Mr. Ashcroft will soon be sworn in as Attorney General. A recent editorial on the Missouri C.C.C. Web site concerning the Ashcroft nomination was headlined “Our Ship Has Come In.” Waxing poetical, the writer went on to say that, to those with a religious cast of mind, Mr. Ashcroft’s ascendancy means “the whole tragic sequence of the Carnahan plane crash seemed to have a Higher Purpose.” (That followed a typical essay arguing that “the present and future schism in American politics is not necessarily ideological, doctrinal or partisan, but racial.”)

The group’s initials may look familiar because the C.C.C. is the same organization that so badly embarrassed Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Georgia Representative Bob Barr when their connections to the group were exposed in late 1998. Both claimed, implausibly, to be unaware of the C.C.C.’s racist pedigree.

In the current matter, exactly why does the C.C.C. believe its “ship has come in” with Mr. Ashcroft’s nomination? His ideological tilt is one reason, but there is another, mentioned briefly on the C.C.C. Web site, that is just as troubling.

Over the past three years, Mr. Ashcroft—then a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee—evidently took up the cause of a man under investigation for alleged Medicare fraud by the Justice Department. The apparent target of the Justice probe is a St. Louis dentist who also happens to be an active C.C.C. member. Mr. Ashcroft tried to help, “but those efforts had to be put on the back burner when his 2000 re-election campaign for Senate began,” according to a recent column posted on the Web site by a C.C.C. official. The same column boasts that the Ashcroft nomination “will likely mean that some time soon after Jan. 20, the Feds will drop any efforts to indict” their loyal dentist friend.

Whatever the merits of the fraud case, that confident prediction of their man’s rescue by Mr. Ashcroft hints at an unseemly intimacy between him and an openly racist organization. Taken with his remarks to the Southern Partisan, it seems to place this nominee at a point on the American political spectrum from which no Cabinet member should be chosen, least of all an Attorney General.

Before he receives a single vote of confirmation from any decent legislator, Mr. Ashcroft should be required to explain himself—not only by Democrats but by the party of Lincoln and the President-elect, who has told us that his own heart is free of the sin of racial hatred.