It’s difficult to express just how outrageous and surreal are the antics of (the US) Congress and the president this weekend around the Schiavo case. It’s like something out of DeLillo, a sickening mixture of TV-fueled tabloid theatre and heartland hokum dressed up in a high moral dudgeon that can’t fully conceal the crude political agenda at work. We wind up with a bizarre, unsettling misfiring of the US constitutional system, in which two branches of government punch a ragged hole through the barrier between federal and state affairs and rudely throw their weight onto the scales of justice in one family’s grieving dispute.(The United States) does, of course, possess a perfectly functional legal system that handles the sad and difficult details of cases like Terri Schiavo’s. the Schiavo case has run its course and more through the Florida courts. The legal record does not suggest even the thinnest reed of hope for a recovery. In a case like this, we’re all entitled to our opinions, of course. But only if you’re a congressman or a president do you get to ignore the courts, overrule judges and have your opinion trump the law. So to hell with the courts, to hell with the evidence, and to hell with the careful determination of Terri Schiavo’s wishes that the courts have made. Bush and his supporters aren’t happy with the outcome, so they’re going to federalise the case! The president himself — who has, through international crises thick and thin, been unable to rouse himself from those long, long vacations at his Texas ranch, even when hundreds of thousands were killed by the Indian Ocean tsunami — will fly back to Washington to sign the bill!The hypocrisy would be ludicrous if the case weren’t so heart-rending. We will turn our backs on the myriad deaths in Sudan, we will pay any price in casualties to root out phantom weapons of mass destruction, we will execute the mentally retarded without lifting a pardoning executive finger — but heaven forbid the courts from concluding that one poor woman whose brain shut down many years ago would have preferred her relatives let her die in peace.Excerpted from an article by Scott Rosenberg at Salon.com
