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Tuesday, March 22, 2005Ryan Sager (via Instapundit) suggests that Schiavo and steroids are on par as acts of Congressional frivolity. The steroids issue is unquestionably frivolous. The Schiavo case, which Sager also suggests is a Constitutional overreach, is another matter. Congressional overreach? Maybe. Frivolity? Certainly not.A Constitutional reading on the Schiavo case is a toughie. But if you're looking at original intent, the Declaration is a good place to start. Its most famous words concern, er, "certain inalienable rights" including life. While Congress is wrong to get involved in about 80% of what it does, the annihilation of a citizen under its jurisdiction would seem to be an issue. And while the right to one's own life may imply the right to choose one's own death, it's hard not to argue in favor of the first when there is doubt since the sustaining of life is readily reversible while its ending is not. Smart alecks have voiced what I would put thusly: Would the left be so ready to take its time if the issue were abortion and the woman were in danger of giving birth? It's been suggested that the right is being hypocritical in raising this point as a smokescreen to suggest that its hypocritical federalizing is okay since the left is possessed of a similarly hypocritical disposition. Two points. One: The right has always celebrated hypocrisy - the hommage vice pays to virtue - as a necessary element in a civlization comprised of fallen souls; the left is insufficiently humorous to appreciate the well-meaning cynicism in this. Two: The situations are not comparable. As I have said, the Congress is seeking to protect one of the three major rights for which we fought in the American Revolution. In a hyperlegalistic society, there is a lot of chitchat about which "i"s are dotted and which "t"s are crossed, but one suspects that the founders' silence on the matter of starving people to death can be found in the single syllable, "duh," which any modern day founder would surely utter if it were suggested that letting the helpless starve to death was wrong and quite possibly murder. Cicero, whom we pointed to last night (this morning?) had it exactly right when he suggested that this whole charade was an effort to euthanize Schiavo without actually using the word or the alternative phrase, mercy killing. But that's what this is about. Not about living wills, intent of patient or anything else. It's about whether you can off people whose lives you find insufficiently worthy of being lived. Mr. Schiavo found himself a judge who agreed that Terri was a drag, what's the point? As I've said before, if he feels this way, we need to find him a judge who will grant him a divorce. In the mean time, Congress was right to break new ground here, for now that we know that people like Mr. Schiavo exist as real human beings, and not just perverse hypotheticals in textbooks, we need to figure out as a society just what to do to insure that the right to life (and its potential corresponding right to death) are applied for the citizen to whom the right belongs, not the psychosocial convenience of related parties. Mr. Schiavo says he's ready to move on. But those protestations ring hollow if he cannot move on with her living but only with her dead. Killing people for the sake of "closure" is a bit much. Offer Schiavo his divorce and send him on his way. If he won't take it, tell him to sit down and shut up. Final thoughts: Nobody hates more than I to suggest that Congress get involved in anything it's not already involved in. But the issues in the Schiavo case go to the heart of a very big issue: What should our nation do to insure the right to life? Once upon a time, killing Blacks (they were called "Negroes" and worse at the time) was no big deal. If they were slaves, it was like putting down a horse. If they were Freemen, well, it's still not like they were white. That was the perverse standard our whole nation honored till the Civil War and that some Southern counties still hadn't worked out by the late 60s. It took action by Congress, with the Civil Rights Acts, to assert that the nation collectively honored fully the rights of Blacks to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. With medical technology altering the way that life works, exists and continues, we are at a point today where what constitutes a living human being is in dispute, both in terms of vegetative or terminally ill patients and in terms of fetuses. The states will have to work out many policies, procedures and definitions for what to do in response to the questions raised. At the same time, there does need to be some larger consensus as to how to assure the rights of the citizens of our Consitutional Republic. And to determine where disagreement is or isn't permissible. Mississippi can't decide that Blacks don't, after all, have the same right to life as Whites. It also can't decide that fetuses do have the same right to life as people already breathing on their own. In both cases, the Feds set the rules. But Mississippi can decide that those who commit murder don't have the right to live. And it can put in place rules that implicitly make the lives of Mississippi fetuses more valued than those of, say, New York fetuses. In other words, there is room for both Federal standards and state by state variations within our existing socio-governmental framework. The process underway is doing the same thing that we've done with abortion and with the civil rights of Blacks - it's helping establish a framework for understanding and locating the intersection of the states' rights to self-government and the individual's protections under our national Constitution and government. The Schiavo case set the process in motion and the drama involved has caused heady rhetoric and bold action on all sides. But this is a debate we've needed to have and were going to have sooner or later. Congress and the President jumping in and getting the courts involved was thus necessary and appropriate, horrible as it is to suggest that the nation was for once better off for having Congress in session rather than on recess. 
posted by gbarto at 9:52 PM |
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