A FOX NEWS EDITORIAL

April 15, 1997

These are tough days for Vice President Al Gore. He hit up a Buddhist group for political contributions, made fund-raising calls from his office (using, he points out, a Democratic National Committee calling card), survived a sweaty-faced news conference to explain it all away, then took off on an ill-advised swing through China where his press was anything but kind.

But Gore may come to recall these as the good old days if Rep. Harold Rogers can build traction behind a new issue making the rounds. Rogers, a non-word-mincing Kentucky Republican, says that the National Performance Review Office, which Gore heads, along with his Reinventing Government project, pressured the Immigration and Naturalization Service last year to put the naturalization of more than 1 million applicants for U.S. citizenship on the fast-track.

They became Americans just in time to register to vote and help re-elect Gore and his boss, Bill Clinton. Rogers takes a bare-knuckles approach to what he regards as the administration's most scandalous deal to date. "Normally we naturalize 300,000 new citizens a year," he said. "In 1996, they naturalized 1.1 million. They did so because the administration was running roughshod over the immigration service to get as many people naturalized and registered to vote as possible. Gore's aides sent e-mail to pressure the commission to speed it up. And they did.

They relaxed the rules in order to surpass the goal. They did away with the required FBI check. At least 250,000 of the 1.1 million new citizens may not have undergone a full criminal history check. Of that number, 71,000 had criminal records and 10,800 had felony backgrounds; 180,000 of the 250,000 did not undergo a fingerprint check. We will never know how many of those 180,000 had criminal records."

In tough back and forth testimony before Rogers' appropriations subcommittee earlier this month, INS commissioner Doris Meissner conceded that some of her agents may have loosened the rules for checking potential citizens. Rogers said those who did should be fired, and warns that if heads don't roll, he'll withhold the agency's funding. Meissner got the message. She ordered an audit of INS procedures that will be released this week. The agency's spokesman, Eric Andrus, concedes there were problems with background checks, saying,

"Maybe our grasp exceeded our reach, but we've made significant improvements to the citizenship process." That's not nearly good enough for Rogers. He views the sudden crush of new citizens as a blatantly partisan election-year tool put at the service of the incumbent Democrats. Says Rogers: "This is the selling of American citizenship for a vote.

The most valuable thing America can give anyone is citizenship, with all the rights that hundreds of thousands have died for. They are selling American citizenship for a vote."

If Rogers can prove that to be true, Gore's problems will multiply faster than the population of the country he hopes to lead.

John Moody

Vice President, News Editorial

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