Open Schiavo thread
Feel free to comment here on the federal government’s decision to intervene in the Terry Schiavo case. I was paying zero attention to this until I read the AP story this morning. My first response to it is identical to Orin Kerr’s: Missing from the press coverage I have read is any sense of the ...
Feel free to comment here on the federal government's decision to intervene in the Terry Schiavo case. I was paying zero attention to this until I read the AP story this morning. My first response to it is identical to Orin Kerr's:
Feel free to comment here on the federal government’s decision to intervene in the Terry Schiavo case. I was paying zero attention to this until I read the AP story this morning. My first response to it is identical to Orin Kerr’s:
Missing from the press coverage I have read is any sense of the merits of the federal case enabled by the new law. As I understand it, a federal court will now review the merits of the state court decision ordering the withdrawal of the feeding tube to see if the withdrawal satisfies federal statutory and constitutional law. Does any one have a sense of what the federal court is likely to do? Are there obvious constitutional problems with the state court order, and if so, under what theories and supported by what precedents?
Howard Bashman thinks the law as passed and signed is constitutional but makes no comment on what the district court judge would rule. Bashman also provides a welter of links to media reaction. Andrew Sullivan raises a valid point about what this means for modern-day conservatism:
So it is now the federal government’s role to micro-manage baseball and to prevent a single Florida woman who is trapped in a living hell from dying with dignity. We’re getting to the point when conservatism has become a political philosophy that believes that government – at the most distant level – has the right to intervene in almost anything to achieve the right solution. Today’s conservatism is becoming yesterday’s liberalism.
Comment away!!! As Mickey Kaus says, “Our society is going to have to have this out at some point–why not now?” UPDATE: Dahlia Lithwick goes medieval on the federal intervention in Slate:
You can put aside the doctrine of federalism for Terri Schiavo, and the principles of separation of powers, and comity, and of deference to finality and the rule of law. But you’d want to be certain, on the day you do so, that what you’re sacrificing them for some concrete legal value that matters a whole lot more. Subordinating a centuries-old culture of law to an amorphous, legally meaningless “culture of life,” is not a decision to be taken over a weekend.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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