Brain Dead

They can have everything going for them, as they did in the debate over whether the federal courts should intervene in the Schiavo family tragedy, and still the Democrats can't find the nerve or the energy to counter right wing hypocrisy, inconsistency, malversation and blatant opportunism.

The party that aggressively seeks to limit judicial authority over such issues as the death penalty, abortion, gay marriage and public displays of religious bric-a-brac should be a sitting duck for its pharisaical effort to force judges to step between families and doctors in what are difficult, painful, emotionally-charged personal decisions. You'd think that the opposition would have an easy time unmasking the party of states' rights and judicial restraint when it tries to strong-arm the federal courts into contravening state courts in a particular case that has already been litigated to death.

But, just as it took moderate Republicans to drive a stake into the heart of the neocon plan to put the Social Security Administration out of business, it was conservatives like Harvard law professor and former Reagan solicitor general Charles Fried who were left to call the president and congressional Republicans to task for reneging on their professed commitment to states' rights. Has the Democrats' embarrassment over their own many compromises -- on the death penalty and militarism and corporate welfare and health care and trade policy and a hundred other issues -- shamed them finally into silence?

"In their intervention in the Terri Schiavo matter," Fried wrote in the New York Times, "Republicans in Congress and President Bush have, in a few brief legislative clauses, embraced the kind of free-floating judicial activism, disregard for orderly procedure and contempt for the integrity of state processes that they quite rightly have denounced and sought to discipline for decades." Fried concluded the congressional action was an "absurd departure from principles of federalism and respect for sound and orderly judicial administration."

It was depressing to watch the Democrats enter another battle in command of the moral and political high ground and proceed to lose the fight, especially a skirmish they should have been ready for. Already looking to the states to market-test solutions to such problems as health insurance, economic equity, corporate responsibility and environmental degradation, they wouldn't have to do much more than find-and-replace their way through old speeches on states rights to light upon sound arguments for not changing what until last Sunday was settled law.

Whether or not the Republicans' perpetual vegetable bill could or should have been voted down, the debate was a missed opportunity to drive home arguments about the need to change national priorities in the area of health care. Instead of accepting the brannigan as a disagreement over the fate of Terri Schiavo, the Democracts might have propelled the discussion toward more burning questions about health care policy. Politicians willing to expend unconscionable quantities of time, effort and emotional and political capital to prolong a single life should be required to devote at least a fraction of as much energy and zeal to considering what they are going to do about the desperate need for national health.

That, in the long run, would extend and save the lives of millions.

If the brain dead are entitled to have Congress go into special session on their behalf, how much less deserving are the living?