Monday, March 21, 2005

Cogitation/Vegetation

Rude Pundit on Terry Schiavo

One of the more publicly-repeatable sentences:
The distorted face of Terry Schiavo is now merely a canvas upon which ideology has been writ large, where the notion of "life" has been perverted to mean "a heartbeat," and where the cruel vicissitudes of politics now rear their ugly, hydra-heads.

Pretty good overall, though the author does allow his obvious leftism to blind him to what the rightists in Congress are actually up to. For example, he thinks that Republicans want to use this case as a defense against Democrats accusing them of "eliminating Social Security". I'll believe that when I see it, partly because an awful lot of the Republicans seem altogether unenthusiastic about doing anything with Social Security.

No, this latest move feels more like a Federal legislature trying to establish a precedent that they can pass a law to override a state court ruling they don’t like, which would be a massive and scary expansion of Federal legislative power. If they can do this, why not another law to overrule last Monday's California court ruling that prohibiting gay marriage violates the state constitution? Discussed at Majikthise.

Congress can't really lose, here. Either they get to be the saviors of Terry Schiavo's life, and weaken state courts in the process, or they get to complain about how those "activist Federal judges" let Terry die, either by declaring their law unconstitutional, or by just ruling on the merits the same way the state court did, that she would have wanted the feeding tube removed.

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