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| Terry Schiavo for Congress | | Date Created: Mar 22, 2005, 10:39 PM |
I was hoping to avoid this. The absurdity of the US Congress getting involved with this case is so obvious that it boggles the mind, but apparently not. Even one of my heroes, Thomas Sowell, who I nearly always agree with thinks the uproar is justified. More on that below but first this from Reason Express.
1. Terri Schiavo for Congress
You cannot make sense of the current Schiavomania in Republican circles without reference to the 2006 midterm election, a contest the GOP is already starting to view with worry. This does not mean the extraordinary effort put forth by Republicans leaders and the White House to steer the Schiavo case into a federal court is cynical politics. It merely means that what might have been a tertiary issue has moved front and center.
First and foremost, the relative flop of George Bush's Social Security initiative put the GOP in a compassion deficit without gaining them anything in return. Republican members of Congress were already tacking away from George Bush, granny-kicker, before the Schiavo case. Now, on this issue, they get to come out swinging against "torturers" and other heartless unbelievers. This is familiar ground for them, and Bush can work it too.
Then factor in deep dissatisfaction among conservatives with the continued GOP-led spending frenzy in D.C. and the need for a base-energizing issue is quite dire. With Democrats in Congress totally unified in their opposition to any cuts in entitlement spending, not just absolute cuts but mere reductions in the rate of increases as well, Republicans can afford no weakness. But with a handful of moderate Republicans still willing to define compassion in terms of spending money, that is not happening. Hence the need to find a compassion issue that is both off-budget and goes where Democrats dare not follow.
Hello, Terri Schiavo.
Does the name Elian Gonzalez sound familiar? The problem is still not who's in the White House though. This is naked grandstanding by legislators who should have nothing to do with it. Horrible tragedies like this are best decided by the individuals involved, but like child custody battles, sometimes the court has to get involved. If this is necessary, it makes it all the worse but the local court is the best one to decide it and it does no good to keep bouncing it up the courts and certainly not to federal legislators. Go back to interfering with the MLB and steroid use. At least that's less of a tragedy.
Seems like all the conservative pundits weighed in on Terry today -- at least at Townhall.com. I've read over Thomas Sowell's essay several times and I have to say I'm disappointed. He falls back on "you can find experts to say anything" and the "would I" questions ("would I want to be kept alive in Terri Schiavo's condition? No. Would I want to be killed so slowly and painfully? No. Would anyone?"). He thinks the husband has a "vested interest" but the family doesn't. He acknowledges that the husband has the legal rights, but here that isn't important because he has a "clear conflict of interest" and Sowell knows what the court should do. Funny that doesn't work when plaintiff attorneys have a clear conflict of interest (financial gain) in tort litigation trials.
Sowell thinks Congress and the President's involvement in the case "do us credit as a nation". I don't remember him feeling that way about the Elian Gonzalez case. He even acknowledges the old adage that "hard cases make bad laws". But we'll have bad law anyway. I can't even buy the liberal baiting here that he accuses of being hypocritical (in relation to their stand on abortion). And this is clearly being run by the Republicans anyway.
If you're a libertarian, this is a clear case of where the individual should have the right to decide for themselves and if they can't do that, the law must be followed for who takes over for those individual decisions, however we may disagree with what they decide. If the lawyers and courts get involved, it makes it more impersonal and even worse, but the system is set up for that, and in this case the local court has addressed all the issues and made a decision. That should be the end of it. If the legislators want to change the rules then make a new law for future such situations. This case demonstrates that conservatives want to tell people what to do just like liberals do routinely.
As Paul Jacobs would say, "this is common sense." |
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