TERRI’S LAW?….I fully realize that most conservative bloviating over Terri Schiavo was designed for dramatic effect. Gotta keep the Christian right convinced the GOP is on their side, after all.
But for a moment, I want to pretend the bloviators are serious. And that raises a question: What do they want? Off the top of my head I can think of a few possibilities:
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More conservative judges, of course. But what good would that do? Michael Schiavo won every case he contested. He won with state judges and federal judges. He won with liberal judges and conservative judges. He won with judges appointed by Bill Clinton, George Bush Sr., and Ronald Reagan. Legally speaking, this wasn’t a left-right issue, and the outcome wouldn’t have differed a whit no matter whose judges were on the bench.
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Stricter federal rules governing when feeding tubes can be removed from no-hope patients. That’s fine, I suppose. I don’t have any special notion about whether this should be a federal or state matter, and I imagine that’s true of most liberals. What’s more, requiring a very high degree of medical certainty before removing feeding tubes doesn’t especially bother me either. It’s really sort of a non-issue. Frankly, unless the Republican leadership deliberately inserted extraneous language solely to provoke a fight ? which I don’t doubt they’d try ? I imagine a bill like this wouldn’t have any trouble gaining bipartisan support.
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Federal regulation governing who has custody in cases like this. That seems pretty pointless, though. This time it was the husband who wanted to remove the tube and the parents who didn’t, but next time it could be the other way around. Besides, federal regulation in this area really does seem overly intrusive. Disputes between family members seem best left to the states.
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Federal regulation of living wills. Actually, this seems like a pretty good idea to me. I can’t think of any special reason why liberals would have a problem with this.
So what’s the next step? What are DeLay and Co. going to offer up to the world to prove that liberals are infatuated with a Culture of Death?? Am I missing something?
