"Everyone seemed to agree that the patients were self-aware — that they could feel, that they had a grounding sense of being a someone who feels."

"But nobody knew exactly how much they retained of themselves: whether they knew themselves as a particular someone, or the someone they once were. It was impossible to know. In the view of these researchers, covertly conscious patients occupied a phenomenological gray space that was inaccessible to scientific probing and even to the human imagination. But some researchers believed that at least some of the patients were largely intellectually intact.... Tabitha learned that once a patient was diagnosed as 'vegetative' and then admitted into a nursing home, it was almost impossible for family members to get a second opinion and a new diagnosis and then, maybe, though only maybe, a new insurance-company authorization and entry into a rehabilitation program. Instead, when a family member, sitting at the bedside, reported the early flickerings of consciousness in a loved one, she was usually dismissed as seeing what she wished to see...."

From "Vegetative Patients May Be More Aware Than We Knew/New research is upending what we thought about the consciousness of patients, leaving families with agonizing choices" (NYT)(gift link, because there's a lot more material at the link, very well presented, including much about the Terri Schiavo case, the recent research about covertly conscious patients, and the vigilance of one wife at her husband's bedside). 

Tennessee judge asserts that the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage case has rendered him unable to decide divorce cases.

It's Hamilton County Chancellor Jeffrey Atherton, denying a divorce to an opposite-sex couple:

“With the U.S. Supreme Court having defined what must be recognized as a marriage, it would appear that Tennessee’s judiciary must now await the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court as to what is not a marriage, or better stated, when a marriage is no longer a marriage,” Atherton wrote in his decision.

“The majority’s opinion in Obergefell, regardless of its patronizing and condescending verbiage, is now the law of the land, accurately described by Justice Scalia as ‘a naked claim to legislative — indeed, super-legislative — power.'”

“The conclusion reached by this Court is that Tennesseans have been deemed by the U.S. Supreme Court to be incompetent to define and address such keystone/central institutions such as marriage, and, thereby, at minimum, contested divorces… [A]ccording to Justice Scalia, the majority opinion in Obergefell represents ‘social transformation without representation.'”

Atherton continued: “Although this Court has some vague familiarity with the government theories of democracy, republicanism, socialism, communism, fascism, theocracy, and even despotism, implementation of this apparently new ‘super-federal-judicial’ form of benign and benevolent government, termed ‘krytocracy’ by some and ‘judi-idiocracy’ by others, with its iron fist and limp wrist, represents quite a challenge for a state level trial court.”

If following Supreme Court precedent is too much of a "challenge" for you, resign.

How would you like to be the couple who spent their time and money litigating over divorce only to find their judge grandstanding and bullshitting like this?

As for "iron fist and limp wrist" — interesting that the judge didn't edit out the phrase that is certain to be read as homophobic. Obviously, there's room to deny that "limp wrist" referred to gay people in that sentence. It's a description of the government, and the government doesn't have a sexual orientation. But it's like complaining about what the government is doing about race and then calling the government "watermelon-eating."

As for "krytocracy," it's not in my dictionary, and Googling it, I see it had some currency back in 2005, in the context of the Terri Schiavo case.

"Then there is Bush’s sense of how far to push, and that he was entitled to do so."

"In August, 2003, he wrote to one of the many judges involved, 'I normally would not address a letter to the judge in a pending legal proceeding…. However, my office has received over 27,000 emails reflecting understandable concern for the well-being of Terri Schiavo.' A Times report published last weekend, about Jeb’s many notes and requests to the White House on other matters when his father worked there, suggests that he 'normally' wasn’t shy at all about asserting influence inappropriately. At the very end, after the autopsy confirmed that Terri’s brain really was too damaged for the sort of consciousness that her parents imagined, Bush wrote to a state prosecutor asking him to investigate Michael Schiavo, suggesting that there had been a sinister gap between when Schiavo found his wife collapsed and when he called 911. 'I urge you to take a fresh look at this case without any preconceptions as to the outcome,' Bush wrote. The prosecutor found nothing."

The last paragraph of Amy Davidson's "The Punisher: Jeb Bush and the Schiavos."

"If you want a government that’s gonna intrude on your life, enforce their personal views on you, then I guess Jeb Bush is your man."

"We really don’t need another Bush in office," said Terri Schiavo's widower Michael.

Though Michael Schiavo got a court order in 2002 to remove his wife’s feeding tube — he said his wife had not wanted to be kept alive artificially — Jeb Bush intervened, pushing the state legislature to pass an unconstitutional bill in a special session giving him authority to order the feeding tube reinserted. When a state judge ordered it removed again, [Michael Schiavo's lawyer George] Felos told ThinkProgress, Bush “manipulated the organs of state government in order to try to evade the court order.”

There's an unfortunate phrase in a serious discussion —  "manipulated the organs of state government" — and yet it's oddly apt, expressing outrage at the inappropriateness of Bush's intrusions. 

Reliving the Terri Schiavo case.

A 13-minute video — and an article — at the NYT today.

Why revisit this controversy now? Scanning the 13-paragraph article for an answer to my question, I find the NYT variation on my question in Paragraph 7: "What, if anything, is the enduring legacy of this painful episode?" In the middle of the next paragraph, I find a key:

[W]hen she was in the news almost daily, there was a discernible increase in the number of Americans who prepared living wills and comparable directives, according to groups like Aging With Dignity, a nonprofit organization that supports end-of-life wishes.

The Terri Schiavo case was effective, like nothing else we've seen recently, in pushing people to sign those documents that will enable medical personnel to shunt them beyond that resource-consuming hospital bed. In these days of aging Baby Boomers and awareness of how we're all paying for everybody else's medical care, there's a growing interest in attaching "living wills and comparable directives" to all the pre-corpses of America.

Perhaps some politicians have learned a lesson: that these life-or-death decisions are probably best left to families and, should irreconcilable differences surface, to the courts....

Yeah, "perhaps"! I notice the phrase "death panels" does not appear in the article. There isn't even a mention of the Affordable Care Act and the recent congressional foray into the field of health care. The Act made it through Congress on the narrowest possible margin and it nearly died over the question of facilitating death.

And here's a second key to why the NYT is revisiting Terri Schiavo now:

Larger questions remain, affecting an estimated 25,000 Americans deemed by doctors to be in a vegetative state. Complicating matters are studies like those reported last week by a team in Belgium and earlier by Adrian M. Owen, a British neuroscientist working in Canada. They have found through brain-imaging techniques that residual cognitive capacity may exist in some people classified as vegetative.

That's phrased awfully delicately, don't you think? What if people start to disbelieve the story that Terri Schiavo was an unburied corpse, with a liquefied brain, tended over by sentimental parents who resisted the straightforward facts delivered by doctors? What if the scientific consensus breaks down because of actual science and we learn that those 25,000 Americans are still in there, longing — some of them anyway — to return to this life? What are we willing to spend to try to bring them back?

If everyone would sign the relevant documents before entering this state, the rest of us will not be asked these questions, because the assumption will be that whatever longing persists in the persistently vegetative is longing for death.

By the way, the NYT article begins and ends with literary riffs on the name Schiavo, which is Italian for "slave." Paragraph 1 portrays Schiavo as a metaphorical slave — "slave to an atrophied brain... slave to bitter fighting.. slave to... court hearings... to politicians...." And the last paragraph ends:

[T]he woman born Theresa Marie Schindler had no control over the powerful forces that controlled her own fate. Just as if she were a schiavo, a slave.

Is that poignant or maudlin? "Slave" was the name of the man who fought for her death. Schindler was the name of the parents who fought for her life. And slavery is a profound topic unto itself. Should it be repurposed as a metaphor? It's a facile metaphor, the literal meaning of the woman's married name, and it degrades the meaning of the word "slave," because lying inert in bed is not much like slavery, which is forced labor. Slaves are human beings with minds capable of making decisions who are deprived moment-by-moment of the autonomy that belongs by right to the human mind.

Terri Schiavo's freedom and autonomy were accorded profound respect. Her problem was her incapacity to form or communicate her choice. That's terribly sad, but it is not slavery.

And the nominees for Worst Playing of the Race Card in the Year 2014 are...

#1:

Conservatives Are Awfully Silent About Jahi McMath

After Terri Schiavo, you’d think more conservatives would be lining up to side with the 13-year-old’s family....

For some reason, Jahi’s condition doesn’t seem to resonate the same way. The silence from the right is rather deafening, with almost no political movement—other than the Schiavo family’s personal outreach—for Jahi. It's easier, apparently, to move legislative mountains for a white woman in conservative Florida precincts than it is for a black girl from ardently liberal, urban Oakland, Calif.

The Schiavo case involved a conflict between parents who wanted to keep their daughter alive and a husband with the legal power to procure her departure.

"You return force with force when somebody assaults you. George was out of breath, he was barely conscious."

"There would have been George dead if he had not acted decisively and instantaneously in that moment when he was being disarmed."

Zimmerman's brother speaks:



Quoted in the linked article, at CNN.com, is Marcia Clark, the prosecutor who failed to convince a jury that O.J. Simpson was guilty. She's talking about the photographs of George Zimmerman, which people on the web are saying prove he didn't have a broken nose.

Suddenly, everyone's a doctor, the kind of doctor that does diagnoses through blurry web videos. Flashback: Remember when Senator Bill Frist — a Harvard-trained doctor — questioned the diagnosis of Terri Schiavo "based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office"? He got slammed for that.

But here's Marcia Clark: "Anyone who's seen a broken nose is aware of the fact that the blood spurts. That leads to a lot of bleeding. You would have expected to see blood on the front of George Zimmerman's shirt collar. Blood — you know, in many more places."

Anyone knows. Of course, a broken nose is a veritable geyser. So says the expert on blood evidence. I know she's seen a lot of blood. Blood does gush from slashed throats. But a broken nose? I'm going to Google that. Here's a list of symptoms, according the Mayo Clinic website (boldface added):

Signs and symptoms of a broken nose may appear immediately or may take up to three days to develop. Signs and symptoms may include:

Pain or tenderness, especially when touching your nose
Swelling of your nose and surrounding areas
Bleeding from your nose
Bruising around your nose or eyes
Crooked or misshapen nose
Difficulty breathing through your nose
Discharge of mucus from your nose (rhinorrhea)
Feeling that one or both of your nasal passages are blocked

I am trying to fathom the depths of mendacity around the Trayvon Martin case. Why aren't people afraid of uttering statements that are so easily devastated?

For a prosecutor to make extreme and overconfident statements about evidence, when the statements are not even remotely accurate and the inaccuracy is detected through 5 seconds of Googling? I understand why people want to lie and deceive, but to throw away your credibility so carelessly?

Santorum lost his last Senate race by 17.4 percentage points — "the biggest for any incumbent senator in Pennsylvania since at least the Civil War."

"That eyepopping margin is the chief reason that few people took Mr. Santorum seriously last year when he started running for president."

Mr. Santorum says he was caught in “a meltdown year” for Republicans...

It was 2006.

But if the climate was harsh, Mr. Santorum was part of it. Always brash, he had become a more rancorous figure since he last faced the voters in 2000. He was No. 3 in his party’s leadership and responsible for its messaging, which often meant either defending Mr. Bush or going on the attack.

And he took high-visibility roles on divisive issues, including abortion, homosexuality and the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo....

The voters to whom he is appealing this year — mainly conservatives and evangelical Christians — are the same core voters he appealed to in Pennsylvania. But in 2006, they were a minority in the state’s general election; now they dominate the Republican primaries. And they are drawn to Mr. Santorum’s moral certitude, his fire-and-brimstone passion, his pugilistic posture of never giving up and never giving in.

"Death from Dehydration Is Usually Serene."

An ABC News article, from 2005, back when people were agonizing over Terri Schiavo.

"The process of starving to death seems very barbaric but in actuality is very peaceful," said Dr. Fred Mirarchi, assistant clinical professor of emergency medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia.

"The patient's experience is really pretty benign," said Dr. Joanne Lynn, a hospice physician associated with Americans for Better Care of the Dying, a group working for improved end-of-life care. "Overwhelmingly, what will happen is nothing."...

"Patients [become] uremic -- filled with bodily toxins -- and are unaware of their surroundings," Mirarchi said. "They develop electrolyte imbalances that eventually cause an abnormal beating of the heart."...

"The heart will then stop and the patient will die," said Mirarchi....

"Going without water makes it more gentle," Lynn said. "Allowing chemicals [in the blood] to cause arrhythmia is more merciful."

That came up first when I Googled "patients die of dehydration," which I did because I was trying to find this news article I'd read yesterday. Here it is: "Elderly patients dying of thirst: Doctors forced to prescribe drinking water to keep the old alive, reveals devastating report on hospital care." That's in the Daily Mail, reporting on the situation in the UK:

The snapshot study, triggered by a Mail campaign, found staff routinely ignored patients’ calls for help and forgot to check that they had had enough to eat and drink.

Dehydration contributes to the death of more than 800 hospital patients every year.

Another 300 die malnourished.

Am I wrong to suspect there is a form of euthanasia going on?

"It takes a special kind of political and moral idiocy to choose such a moment to wax nostalgic for [Vietnam]."

Christopher Hitchens can't stand George Bush -- especially "his contented assumption that 'faith' is, in and of itself, a virtue":

This self-satisfied mentality helps explain almost everything, from the smug expression on his face to the way in which, as governor of Texas, he signed all those death warrants without losing a second's composure.

It explains the way in which he embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin, ex-KGB goon, citing as the basis of a beautiful relationship the fact that Putin was wearing a crucifix. (Has Putin been seen wearing that crucifix before or since? Did his advisers tell him that the US president was that easy a pushover?)

It also explains the unforgivable intervention that Bush made into the private life of the Schiavo family: leaving his Texas ranch to try and keep "alive" a woman whose autopsy showed that her brain had melted to below flatline a long time before.

Here is a man who believes the "jury" is still "out" on whether we evolved as a species, who regards stem cell research as something profane, who affects the odd belief that Islam is "a religion of peace."

But he still thinks Bush was right to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, he's damned sure Bush is an idiot for comparing Iraq to Vietnam.

Terri Schiavo died a year ago.

How is the press marking the anniversary? Some are running with the "living wills" theme. Others are revisiting the husband and parents who fought so hard over her fate. Still others reargue the issues of life and death.

Why I haven't blogged about Justice O'Connor's speech.

People keep emailing me the link to this NPR report on a speech that Sandra Day O'Connor gave at Georgetown the other day. I assumed I would blog about this speech yesterday after some of my students brought it up. So let me explain why I didn't blog about it. We don't have the full text of the speech, just Nina Totenberg's summary, and it seems to me that everything in it relates to stories that were current last April, which I blogged about back then quite extensively. In a long post titled "Stirring up hatred against judges," I wrote (in part):

People have been complaining about "activist" judges for years. But here's a Washington Post report on a Senate speech by Senator John Cornyn that speculates that judicial activism might cause violence....

The article connects that remark (which seems to be a rather idiotic sort of talking off the top or your head) with Representative Tom DeLay's recent comment....

DeLay was grousing about the judges in the Schiavo case; Cornyn was complaining about the recent Supreme Court case that barred the death penalty for persons who commit their crimes before they reach the age of 18.

It is really a shame how little people understand of the reasons judges decide cases the way they do. DeLay and Cornyn, like many others, signal to the public to think that the judges are simply out of control and the cases are inexplicable as the serious work of deeply thoughtful persons steeped in the legal tradition. It wouldn't be wise just to assume that judges are unerring oracles of law, but to leap to the opposite conclusion and decide they are frauds is even more foolish. And for a public figure even to hint at violence as a solution is completely unacceptable.

I continue the discussion the next day in "Judicial politics." The next post, "Congress and the judiciary -- with a response from Justice Kennedy," acknowledges that Justice Kennedy had addressed the subject. (He said, when pressed as a House committee hearing that "disagreements over the meaning of the Constitution were 'a very important part of democratic dialogue.'") There's a fourth post on the subject here.

Listening to Totenberg's report, I got the feeling she'd heard a stock speech composed a year ago. It referenced those old Cornyn and DeLay remarks, as Totenberg reports. I agree with O'Connor's points and think Totenberg put together a spiffy report, but it felt like a report from last year, too stale to address. Cornyn and DeLay haven't continued with that idiocy, and a lot of things have happened since then. Why not address those things? Why not say something about how the push-back against Cornyn and DeLay changed their behavior? Maybe she did say some other things that would have seemed fresher. I don't know. I don't have the text to use to find other things that might inspire some blogging. But the text is withheld. Why? Well, one reason for not releasing the text of a speech is because you want to deliver the same speech over and over again.

"The Republicans can't marginalize Hillary. She has already marginalized herself."

Should I talk about Maureen Dowd's column? Not only is she behind the TimesSelect wall, but she's got a sudden big spoiler for the movie "Matchpoint," which I've been meaning to see. Damn it! But the topic interests me: Is Hillary Clinton angry?

Ken Mehlman recently called her angry. Was that misogynistic? Dowd assumes it was. While it's a classic move to fault women for being weak and for being strong, and that's an unfair trap that we need to notice and reject, we need also to avoid the opposite problem of claiming that every criticism of a woman is misogynistic. If women are going to run for high office, we have to deal with strong criticism. Mehlman only said "I don't think the American people, if you look historically, elect angry candidates... Whether it's the comments about the plantation or the worst administration in history, Hillary Clinton seems to have a lot of anger." Slapping the label "misogynistic" on that is too easy.

But here's Dowd's real point:

Hillary's problem isn't that she's angry. It's that she's not angry enough. From Iraq to Katrina and the assault on the Constitution, from Schiavo to Alito and N.S.A. snooping to Congressional corruption, Hillary has failed to lead in voicing outrage. She's been too busy triangulating and calculating to be good at articulating.

The Republicans can't marginalize Hillary. She has already marginalized herself.

This chimes with the Kerry complaint quoted in the previous post. HC seems to be preserving herself for the presidential run, holding back, knowing that the Mehlmans will snap back whenever she speaks up. The Democrats want her to expose herself more, to help them in this election year. And, really, she should. How does that carefulness -- "triangulating and calculating" -- establish that she is strong enough to be President?

The mystery of a TimesSelect blog... and whether Hillary should run.

"Link to this" it says at the bottom of a post by "The Opinionator" by Chris Suellentrop. It looks like a blog, but it's in TimesSelect. I just don't understand the concept. Link so some small fraction of your readers can go there? Or did the link function to pierce the wall, allowing me to let my readers see the thing? Let me know if by chance that link worked some magic, but I'm going to talk about the post anyway. It's titled "Hillary, Don't Run."

In a bitterly divided and partisan nation, is there anything conservatives and liberals can agree on? Yes: Hillary Clinton, please don’t run for president. Lone Star liberal Molly Ivins kicked off a wave of anti-Hillary commentary with a column last week that began, “I’d like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.”

Sen. Clinton’s primary shortcoming? Ivins believes she isn’t liberal enough: “Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.”...

Conservatives are delighted about liberals’ newfound anti-Hillary animus. National Review’s Jonah Goldberg attributes the sentiment to Sen. Clinton’s recent moves to the right. “To be honest, I never understood what they saw in her in the first place,” he wrote in his weekly Los Angeles Times column. “[T]here’s something oddly satisfying in the possibility that Clinton being herself is politically disastrous. And, if she’s really just playing one more role according to some classically Clintonian political triangulation, there’s something equally satisfying to the prospect that even her fans aren’t falling for it anymore.”

Oh, wait, Suellentrop didn't take a position anyway. He's really only collecting links -- to Ivins and Goldberg and also to Arianna Huffington and Josh Marshall. I guess I should just copy his links and talk about the same subject myself. If so, should I put a "via Suellentrop" link? It's kind of screwy to do that if it doesn't get people to the post but just gives them a little experience of exclusion. And the main reason you do a "via" link is to send a fellow blogger some traffic. How can I be guilty of denying a blog something it's already denying itself?

A TimesSelect blog doesn't function in the blogosphere, but maybe that makes some sense for TimesSelect folks. They aren't really ready to read blogs, and it's nice to have a trusted voice to categorize and summarize what's being said by various commentators on the web, some of whom might actually even be bloggers. Look, I found Josh Marshall and Arianna Huffington for you!

Anyway, what do I think of these voices on the left and the right who are saying Hillary shouldn't run? Is the opinion trustworthy because it's on both sides? Not at all!

Those on the left don't like her -- as Suellentrop acknowledges -- because she's not far enough to the left. They ought to know that an excessively left candidate is doomed, but they don't want to face that horrible reality. These people were against Bill Clinton too, back before he actually did that thing that Democrats seem almost never to be able to do, win a presidential election. On the right, you've got folks who've loathed Hillary all along and who, of course, don't want the Democrats to win an election.

So how should Hillary hear these voices on the left and right who don't want her to run? As strong encouragement! But she's got to find a way to keep her hawkish credentials, or we'll be stuck once again with a Democratic candiate with an incomprehensible attitude toward national security who will push those of us who vote almost entirely on that ground to go with the Republican again.

But maybe it's already too late for Clinton. She's already lost too much credibility catering to the Ivins crowd. Being the front runner, she's got them at her all the time, making demands -- demands that she sacrifice all her potential to win in the end. Poor Hillary! If she finds a way through this ordeal, maybe she is good enough to be President.

A year in the life of the blog.

January: I just wrecked my car.

February: Is podcasting good?

March: Is it possible to explain the Schiavo statute on television?

April: "Try to survive a tornado with a post-structuralist"

May: Notes on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

June: Who was inconsistent about federalism in Raich?

July: Tattoos remind you of death

August: Where am I?

September: The Roberts confirmation hearing

October: State Street, pre-Halloween

November: In which I advise local liberal lawyers to support Alito

December: How political is that "gay cowboy movie"?

Joan Didion on Terri Schiavo.

Didion finds many interesting angles to the story. Her focus is not legal, but personal and psychological. She examines not just the motivations of Michael Schiavo and the parents, but also the motivations of all of us:

We do not know how many minutes Theresa Schiavo spent in cardiac arrest. It was later generally reported that this arrest was a "heart attack" caused by a potassium deficiency. The potassium deficiency, it was widely suggested, had been caused by what was sometimes described as "bulimia" and sometimes, more generally, as an "eating disorder."

This suggestion persisted, carrying with it a hint of the disapproval often expressed toward people in unfortunate circumstances who can be suspected to have had bad habits. The "bad habits" serve in such cases to isolate these unfortunate circumstances from our own. Patricia J. Williams, in The Nation, striking this not uncommon note, spoke of

the bizarre events played out in the name of force-feeding Terri Schiavo, a woman whose bulimic aversion to food was extreme enough to induce a massive systemic crisis that left her in what doctors describe as a "persistent vegetative state."

Theresa Schiavo, in this construct, had for whatever reason played a role in her own demise, meaning that what happened to her need not happen to us.

However comforting it may have been to believe this, the suggestion (no diagnosis exists) of an "eating disorder" appears to have been entirely assumptive, based on no evidence beyond the unexceptional facts that she had some years before gained weight, gone on a diet, and lost the weight.

There's much more in the article.

Surprisingly risqué comedy material for Laura Bush.

Laura Bush took over for her husband doing the comedy at the White House Correspondents Dinner tonight. I was surprised by how risqué it was. She talked about her frustration that Bush goes to bed early, while she stays up and watches "Desperate Housewives." She portrayed herself going out to Chippendale's with Lynne Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and running into Justices O'Connor and Ginsburg there. And she described Bush's ineptitude in his early days of ranching with the old joke that he "tried to milk a horse ... and it was a male horse." So, thanks, Laura, for leaving us with that picture of George with a horse's penis in his hand!

But I don't have a problem with this because I'm tired of the recent upsurge of social conservatism. Was Laura's routine a sign that we're entering a libertarian conservative phase? I hope so. And is it too much to imagine that the appearance of those two Roe-upholding Justices in that Chippendale's scenario is Laura's way of assuring us that Bush is not planning to nominate a social conservative Justice to the Supreme Court?

UPDATE: Ambivablog connects Laura's routine to Frank Rich's column about "South Park Conservatives." There's also some discussion along these lines in the comments. And I'll just say that horse joke reminded me of this "South Park" episode. Oh, and that I also thought that Frank Rich column was too dull to talk about. Obviously, there are social conservatives and libertarian conservatives. Who thought "South Park" was promoting socially conservative ideas? No one who likes "South Park" could have been surprised by the way it treated the Terri Schiavo case (in the "Best Friends Forever" episode). Rich acts like Republicans were taken by surprise after thinking "South Park" was on their side. What a straw man!

Let's roll back 30 years and start over.

David Brooks on Roe v. Wade: Things would have worked out better for liberals if the Supreme Court had not made abortion into a right but had allowed the issue to work its way out in the democratic arena.

Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.

The only way out of our nasty politics, he thinks, is to overrule Roe v. Wade:

[T]he entire country is trapped. Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better.

But it's not possible to redo the last 30 years. We already are where we are, and those who think abortion should be legal have spent these decades -- or their whole lives -- thinking abortion was not only legal but a constitutional right. To take that right away now would not give us a chance to have the democratic debate we never had. It would be a wholly different experience of taking away a right, after the bitter politics had built to the level where the side opposed to the right has finally gotten its way, after we have already become polarized. What makes you think that won't be insanely bitter?

True, it will be democratic -- though the pro-abortion-rights side won't give up on fighting in the courts -- but it won't be the same democratic debate we might have had back in the early 1970s. Ironically, if, after all these years, social conservatives finally gain a majority on the Supreme Court that is willing to overturn the precedent, it will activate political liberals and libertarians. And one thing they will want is their majority back on the Supreme Court.

I think David Brooks, like most of those who push for radical change, is indulging himself, painting a rosy picture of life post-change.

UPDATE: Ramesh Ponnuru at The Corner tries to rehabilitate Brooks after my attack. Ponnuru assumes the debate would return to the states, which is a subject I took up in the comments. I wrote:

[T]he Supreme Court can't ensure that if it overruled Roe v. Wade, the matter would be determined at the state level. With a new political field opened up, Congress would want to do things too. Unless the Court also did something awfully strong to limit the Commerce Power, Congress would have the power to regulate abortion, including making it a federal crime. I can't imagine that it wouldn't try!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ponnuru does acknowledge the potential for federal action here:

[I]f Roe ended, pro-choice activation would, I think, not likely be matched by pro-life quiescence. There would be too many state (and federal) legislative battles to fight, and nobody on the pro-life side would think their work done.

He goes on to say:

In a lot of places, you'd have state laws that restricted abortion a lot more than it is restricted today, but not as much as pro-lifers (like me) would like. So hard-core partisans on both sides would be unhappy. ... Public policy on abortion would be closer to median-voter sentiment. And the sense of the law's illegitimacy would be much harder for the losing side of any battle to maintain (as Brooks points out).

I do think this prediction of moderation, with the hardcore ends of the spectrum unhappy envisions decentralized politics rather than a sudden grab for everything in Congress in a very bitter, unsettling fight. Why wouldn't the groups on both sides converge on Congress and demand everything they want? How could Congress ignore that? If the Terri Schiavo case is any indication, Congress will plunge forward and take over this area.

A "Death With Dignity" Act for Wisconsin?

NBC15 reports:

Two state lawmakers plan to bring the issue of assisted suicide back to the floor, saying recent high profile cases prove people want more control over their life in death.

State Senator Fred Risser (D-Madison) says, "This is not a case of whether or not you're going to die, you are going to die. The question is how are you going to die? And this bill gives the person who's dying one more option."

In the wake of the Terri Schiavo saga, Senator Risser says people are worried they don't have enough control over their lives when dying....

[Under the proposal, y]ou must be 18 years old and deemed both mentally competent and terminally ill by 2 doctors. Then after an oral request and a written request signed by 3 witnesses, a physician can prescribe the requested medication.

UW professor of law and bioethics, Alta Charo, poses the question, "Since terminally ill patients are already entitled to have the ventilator turned off so they can suffocate to death, wouldn't it be more merciful to let them choose another method in which death comes more as a friend not as an enemy?"...

According to the article, the prospects for passing this law are quite low.

DeLay backs down a bit about judges.

Good.

"I believe in an independent judiciary. I repeat, of course I believe in an independent judiciary," DeLay said.

At the same time, he added, the Constitution gives Congress power to oversee the courts.

"We set up the courts. We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse," DeLay said.

It's true, there are congressional checks on the judiciary, but we expect you to exercise them responsibly. The really effective congressional check, however, is the Senate's power to confirm. DeLay, not being in the Senate, is left to chatter about impeachment (ridiculous), the "power of the purse" (underfund the courts? that's just destructive), and cutting back jurisdiction (show me the proposal and I'll comment). In short, he's just saber-rattling, or as I prefer to call it "purse swinging." I know he's hot to keep some sort of Schiavo-momentum going. But the serious debate about judges is the one going on in the Senate.

UPDATE: And here's the NYT front-page article on DeLay and the judiciary. The subheading in the paper NYT is "Unyielding, DeLay Steps Up Attacks on Judiciary Over Schiavo Case." So what is it -- backing down or stepping up? I see the Times is also calling it his "crusade against judges" -- leveraging religion into the prose. Here's how the Times presents the material that was in the AP article linked above:

"Of course I believe in an independent judiciary," [DeLay] said. He also apologized for the impeachment comment, even as he insisted it was well within the purview of Congress to rein in the courts.

"Sometimes I get a little more passionate," Mr. DeLay said, "particularly during the moment and the day that Terri Schiavo was starved to death. Emotions were flowing."

"I said something in an inartful way," he added, "and I shouldn't have said it that way, and I apologize. I apologize for saying it that way. It was taken wrong, and I didn't explain or clarify my remarks as I'm clarifying them here."

Mr. DeLay was not specific about what legislative changes, if any, he would like to see emerge from the Judiciary Committee's review. But in announcing that he had asked Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican and the committee chairman, to examine the actions of federal judges in the Schiavo case, Mr. DeLay said the House had previously passed legislation limiting the jurisdiction of the courts and breaking up the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a bill that died in the Senate.

"We set the jurisdiction of the courts," Mr. DeLay said. "We set up the courts. We can unset the courts."

I think he's backing down. And note how bereft of ideas about legislative changes he is.