In the Northwest: Reagan-appointed judge has words for Ashcroft

BELLINGHAM -- If he can spare a few hours from announcing new restrictions on civil liberties, Attorney General John Ashcroft might stop by to hear one of Ronald Reagan's best judicial appointees.

Ashcroft doesn't do much listening, but U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, in his annual address to Western Washington University's Munro Teachers Seminar, might have set him straight on a fundamental truth that has escaped our nation's chief law enforcement officer.

"The Constitution of the United States says what it means and means what it says" is a basic mantra to Coughenour, the chief federal judge for Western Washington.

Coughenour has had occasion to repeat those words, not only at Western but when FBI chief Robert Mueller suggested to him in a conversation that security has supplanted civil liberties concerns in post-9/11 America.

Protestations of a liberal judge?

Nonsense!

Jack Coughenour is one of Republican former Sen. Slade Gorton's closest friends. He was Reagan's first nominee to the federal bench in these parts. His screener at the Justice Department was Ted Olson, who is now U.S. solicitor general.

He is, as well, renowned as a no-nonsense courtroom disciplinarian.