This cannot stand

One has to wonder if we are witnessing a seminal moment in American political history - a Perfect Storm of constitutional issues. The Schiavo case - made into an almost complete grandstanding disaster by the pandering to the religious conservatives - provides an enormous consitutional challenge. We are seeing the rare confluence of both separation of powers and state's rights issues. This may be our generation's Marbury or McCullough - and in that regard this is a breathtaking moment and you wonder how many people realize what we are witnessing.

There is a far better discussion of this than I can offer over on LeanLeft with reference to a CBS analyst's solid analysis of the issue. This weekend's power grab by the Congressional and Executive Branches was nothing less than breathtaking. Hearing a United States Congressman decry the Schiavo case as an issue of "due process" was completely dumbfounding. These same congressmen cut Medicaid budgets and rewrite bankruptcy laws in ways that directly injure the families of people like Terri Schiavo. It is complete hypocrisy - keep her alive at all costs, but send the bill to someone else. These conservatives "like" Terri Schiavo as an individual (although that is an arguable point) but "hate" her as a class of people - a riff on a familiar refrain heard of the South and race relations.

Moreover, who would have ever thought that the governor of a southern state would gladly let the federal govenrment intervene in the affairs of his state like this? Yet this governor is motivated by his own desire to defeat his own state judiciary - strange bedfellows indeed. I simply cannot imagine George Wallace inviting a federal judge to take a case out of the hands of his state's justice system.

The issue now rests in the hands of the federal judiciary - and I have some degree of confidence that it will do the right thing - as this should be seen as a direct threat to the judiciary's power - of which they have always been very protective. The real question for me is whether they will take on the constitutionality of the underlying laws or whether they will find a way to deny relief and sidestep the issue in the process - i.e. - we think the law has constitutional problems, but we are not going to review them because we wouldn't grant the relief to the family anyway. The judiciary needs to deal with this issue directly and make a statement about separation of powers and state's rights. This simply cannot stand.