March 29, 2005

Ben Stein, my favorite comedic actor and Conservative commentator, wrote a terrific piece on the Terri Schiavo controversy for the American Spectator, appropriately titled:
Simply Terrifying

Here is what makes me furious about the Terry Schiavo case, short and sweet.

The courts of the United States can find a right for the abortion industry to take a fully formed, totally healthy baby at nine months' term, out of his mother's womb and murder it by putting scissors through his brain and grinding them about.

They do this without one single word of support from any Congressional act of any kind ever.

They can find a right of savage murderers of innocent women who drown them for a lark to avoid the death penalty because they are old enough to drive and to kill but supposedly too young to be executed. Again, there is not one syllable in any Congressional act that sanctions this protection of the guilty.

But with the Congress and the President of the United States pleading for the life of a woman who is not brain dead, who responds to words and to touch, who is not on life support, whose parents beg for her to be kept alive, whose nurses give affidavits that she can be rehabilitated, with a specific law commanding the courts to review the case to keep this poor soul alive, the courts instead find no rights for her.

This is a court system totally out of control, obviously committed to death, obviously bound by nothing beyond its morbid obsession with its own omnipotence and its fascination with the letting the innocent die. This is simply terrifying. The Falange followers of Francisco Franco had an evil cry: Long live death. Obviously, Justice Kennedy was listening.

Ben couldn't have expressed my own feelings more perfectly.
What also interested me greatly was an email from one of Ben's citizen readers named Richard Donley as to what Terri's death sentence means for the rest of us and what needs to be done with this Thanatos-loving, out of control judiciary:

I'm amazed by the number of your correspondents who fail to understand the most basic principles of our form of government, as shown in their opinions on the Schiavo matter.

We have three independent branches of government. It is the duty of the legislative branch to pass laws, of the executive to approve and enforce them, and of the judicial branch to determine the applicability of the laws in individual cases. It was never the intent of the Founders to allow judges to make laws, nor for them to override the intent of the legislators.

Judges must follow the law just as must everyone else. They have no constitutional right to choose which laws to apply, nor to invalidate laws, nor to decide that standard judicial procedure (so-called due process) is superior to the will of the people as expressed by their elected representatives; yet in this case we have seen judges cast aside or avoid the clear intent of laws passed by both the Florida and national legislature. This is simply unconstitutional.
[What are gonna do about that?--Jen]

Judicial usurpation proceeds apace. There is nothing new about it, of course. In Ohio and, I believe, other states the courts have threatened legislators with jail for, among other things, the "failure" to "properly" fund courts. Again in Ohio a local judge has used some vague language in the preamble to the Ohio Constitution to decide that the legislature was improperly funding schools, and ordered the passage of new laws that would meet his requirements. In Kansas City, Missouri a judge took over the school system, ordered taxes imposed on the people, and designed new school buildings and new educational policies, all without effective opposition from the legislative and executive bodies of the city and state. (And, I might add, without any noticeable improvement in the educational attainments of the students.) Other examples are too numerous to mention.

Judicial usurpation seems to have reached a crescendo with cases concerning the right to life. Roe versus Wade was decided extra-constitutionally, and the Federal courts have time and again denied the states any power to control abortion, acting not to apply the law but to re-write or contravene it. The courts have even gone so far as to use foreign law to justify usurpation of legislative rights and the effective abrogation of the Constitution.

One of your correspondents says, "The courts then stand separately and interpret what the laws say." INCORRECT. It is the duty of the courts to apply the law, and to obey it themselves unless some clear constitutional conflict exists.

Another writer states, "...religious extremists that are more interested in one woman's "life" than in the rule of law." CONFLICTED REASONING. The founding document of our nation calls for the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The law, by any rational interpretation, does not allow the execution of a person who has not been tried and convicted of an appropriate crime. Terri Schiavo is guilty of no crime yet she has been condemned to death by not just removing a form of "treatment", the feeding tube, but by being denied all sustenance no matter how delivered or by whom.
[This became clear when "protestors," even children, were arrested at the hospice for trying to give Terri a drink of water after the tube had been removed.--Jen]

Another, "...in this country, when families can't agree courts must decide. How else would you like this issue to be settled? By Congress?" MISSING THE POINT. Legislatures decide issues, courts apply the law. In this case the courts are ignoring laws specifically passed to deal with this issue.

Still another, "If we are to have ordered liberty in this country, we need to respect the court system and the process of the law, not trash them." WRONG. The interests of liberty and constitutionality require that we rein in the courts and stop their ongoing takeover of legislative powers.

Ben Stein gets on my nerves quite a bit with his whining about his career, fortune, and family. But on issues of liberty and patriotism he could not be more correct. The main danger to our liberties is presently the courts. It is very unfortunate that Congress did not take advantage of this opportunity to insist upon legislative primacy with regard to writing the law, and that the President did not find it in himself to use his Constitutional powers to enforce the rather tentative law that Congress did pass. God help us if this continues.
-- Richard Donley

Well, God Bless you, Richard Donley for putting the issue so plainly and so correctly!
Betcha you're a lawyer and a d*mn good one.
(BTW, the Reader Mail at the American Spectator is a must read for me; it's that good.)
To address his last point, I don't why Congress, President Bush and Gov. Bush didn't do more to see that Terri's right to life was protected, but "Washington (not Houston,) we have a problem."
A very big problem--Look for the black robes.
What we do about it, with God's help, will make all the difference for millions of lives.
If 40 million babies have been aborted since the passage of Roe v. Wade and with the passing of poor voiceless Terri Schiavo, millions of lives have already been lost.
Pay attention: the life you save may be your own.
After Terri's case, how hard will it be for your "guardian" to ask your local court to take out your "life support" should you become incapacitated because that's "what you would have wanted?"