It’s difficult to express just how outrageous and surreal are the antics of Congress and the president this weekend around the Schiavo case. It’s like something out of DeLillo, a sickening mixture of TV-fueled tabloid theater and heartland hokum dressed up in a high moral dudgeon that can’t fully conceal the crude political agenda at work. (See the GOP talking points on the issue if you really want to retch.) We wind up with a bizarre, unsettling misfiring of our constitutional system, in which two branches of government punch a ragged hole through the barrier between federal and state affairs and rudely throw their weight onto the scales of justice in one family’s grieving dispute.
Our nation does, of course, possess a perfectly functional legal system that handles the sad and difficult details of cases like Terri Schiavo’s. For anyone who wants more information about those details, I recommend a careful reading of this page (thanks to Rafe Colburn for the link) — a thorough, dispassionate accounting of the facts of the case from a Florida attorney/blogger. To the extent this source is accurate, and it seems to be — it’s far better documented than TV news, tabloid articles and even what you will get from a serious newspaper — the Schiavo case has run its course and more through the Florida courts. The legal record does not suggest even the thinnest reed of hope for a recovery. (“At this point, much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid.”) In a case like this, we’re all entitled to our opinions, of course. But only if you’re a congressman or a president do you get to ignore the courts, overrule judges and have your opinion trump the law.
So to hell with the courts, to hell with the evidence, and to hell with the careful determination of Terri Schiavo’s wishes that the courts have made. Bush and his supporters aren’t happy with the outcome, so they’re going to federalize the case! The president himself — who has, through international crises thick and thin, been unable to rouse himself from those long, long vacations at his Texas ranch, even when hundreds of thousands were killed by the Indian Ocean tsunami — will fly back to Washington to sign the bill! Sanctity of life? The hypocrisy would be ludicrous if the case weren’t so heart-rending. We will turn our backs on the myriad deaths in Sudan, we will pay any price in casualties to root out phantom weapons of mass destruction, we will execute the mentally retarded without lifting a pardoning executive finger — but heaven forbid the courts from concluding that one poor woman whose brain shut down many years ago would have preferred her relatives let her die in peace. No, that cannot stand; we must bend or break our system of government to stop it.
This is a decadent circus the right has cooked up for us, worthy of that Late-Roman-Empire feeling that ever more deeply enshrouds the Bush era with each new turn of the news cycle. It is also a neon display of the contempt President Bush and his party hold for our legal system (I guess that when it comes to meddling with Florida courts, their track record is successful), and of their willingness to trample on due process and individual rights for the sake of a cause celebre cherished by the Base That Must Be Obeyed.
I keep thinking, in this dark time, that sooner or later Bush, DeLay & co. will cross the line of political propriety so blatantly and incontrovertibly that they will, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, find their ertswhile allies turning away from them in disgust. Maybe transforming the private conflict of a family dispute into grotesque public spectacle will be that sort of Rubicon for them. But I’m afraid that such an outcome would require a stiffer spine and a braver soul than most Democrats seem able to muster.
In the meantime, clearly, everyone who doesn’t want George Bush and Congress to overrule relatives, doctors and courts to make those bedside end-of-life decisions for them needs to draw up that living will, pronto.
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