Who Needs a Budget When Congress Can Indulge In Symbolic Politics?

By DHinMI

It was bad enough when Congress spent most of the week making it look as if the nation's most pressing problem was possible steroid use in professional baseball.  Now they're spending time doing family law:

Congress leaders announced agreement Saturday on legislation they said would allow a severely brain-damaged woman to resume being fed while a federal court decides the right-to-die battle between her parents and her husband.

"We think we have found a solution" to the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said at a Capitol Hills news conference. "All sides agree that this is the best way to proceed."

Final approval was expected Sunday when the House planned to meet in a special session, he said. The Senate planned to pass a resolution Saturday evening that would let House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., call the House into session on Sunday.

DeLay said President Bush would sign the bill as soon as it got to him.

Congress couldn't agree to individual budgets last year, and they've generally passed fewer bills in the last few years than it had in ages, but they're going to call a special session of Congress on a Sunday morning to prevent the continuation of extraordinary measures to keep alive a woman who has never shown any evidence of ever coming out of the vegetative state she's been in for 15 years.

I don't even know what to say about that.  I was in the car a little while ago listening to a report about the case, and I tried to imagine what her husband must feel.  Maybe he's a better man than me, but I would be enraged at her parents for keeping her alive so they could indulge their unfounded hopes that, contrary to what's been said by every single doctor who's testified about her condition, she will "recover."  There's a body that belongs to Terri Schiavo in a Florida nursing home, but it appears that the character and personality of their daughter passed away years ago.  It's an awful situation for everyone, and not something into which I could imagine wanting to insert myself.  But now Congress, in the person of Tom DeLay, is telling Michael Schiavo that Congress has "found a solution" and that "[a]ll sides agree that this is the best way to proceed."

The Schiavo case is one that will surely be discussed in classes on medical ethics for years to come.  How ironic that this ethical dilemma has been declared "solved" by that paragon of personal or professional ethics, Tom DeLay.

Comments

[donna]

I think all the people who think she should be kept alive, including the parents, should be required to spend two weeks with a feeding tube down their throats strapped into a bed doing absolutely nothing.....

[DemFromCT]

With all due respect, donna, some of them, would do it gladly. I hate that the loathsome DeLay wants to 'force doctors to reinsert Terri Schiavo's feeding tube' as ABC News put it. I think it's awful that the government won't give this family the privacy and dignity they deserve, especially when it's being ginned up to distract from DeLay's ethics problems and to build up his wingnut support. He's the worst kind of human being. But the issues are complex and none of the solutions are happy ones.

Armando at Daily Kos suggests that Reid is playing it the only way he can, leaving it to the courts to declare the Congress' attempts to intervene as unconstitutional. The truth is that there's no way to make this any easier, not for the family and not for the country. What a mess.

[Meteor Blades]

I wish that all those folks so eager to butt Congress's nose into this affair - starting with Tom DeLay - would spend one year working at the bedsides of half a dozen patients in a persistent vegetative state. Perhaps this would not change their minds about what should be done, but it would at least provide some relief to the typically overworked staffs at such facilities.

Still, I am curious, DemFromCT. How do you think such cases should be handled?

[alsauf]

I agree with Harry Shearer's comments over on Talking Points Memo - this is a family matter and the rest of us should just butt out (or was that a reference he made about the Peterson trial? Same difference).

As a political issue, I just find it ironic that the conservatives kept insisting that they needed to take over the government because they wanted the government to "stop interfering with our lives" -- and now they are in charge, and they are passing laws that represent the ultimate interference.

Hopefully, this special session of Congress will not distract from the real issue -- Mark McGwire.

[Davinci]

Shows the true meaning of theater of the absurd with the steriod hearings and this special interest crap.

The other problem I have is the media playing it as two equal views against each other. They are not reporting the facts. They have her family on for hours telling lies. Flat lies according to the real record of the case. I found a great blog on this topic for anyone who is interested.

http://abstractappeal.com/schiavo/infopage.html#qanda

[NG]

I am looking for a good places to put this thought, and this may fit. We frustrated Dems are willing to sell our souls to get someone, anyone with a (D) next to their name in Congress. You would think one Zell Miller would be enough of an education. Now we see the Dems standing back from this terrible, religiously driven right to life case, which is made all the worse considering the lack of healthcare access for millions in this country. These frigin right to lifers in this country and in Congress specifically care nothing about quality of life and prevention of suffering. They care nothing about do no harm. They only care about exploiting the life condition weakness of so many Americans for political gain. Either that or they themselves are weak in the head in this reality area! The monetary potential cost of this brainless decision will make healthcare reform next to impossible. Can you imagine the costs to our society in keeping all vegetative human-type life going for as long as possible in America? No wonder we can not afford healthcare coverage for 43 million non-vegetatative citizens! This will surely help--NOT!

Anyway, my point here is that if we support Dems like Reid and the potential Dem senatorial candidate from PA, the extremely pro-life Robert Casey, we should expect more of this pandering, braindead behavior in the future. If you can live with these issues/laws as a minor distraction from a progressive agenda, well fine stick with the strategy. However, if you see this religious driven intrusion into politics and laws and rights as the most dangerous element/challenge to the future of freedom in America, then elevate pro-choice, which is really pro-choice on freedom of body control and pro-choice on religious beliefs, to the highest litmus test level for those you support.

I truly am getting sick of life in this country under the current developing theocracy!

[Incertus]

I wonder if some future historian--assuming we don't wind up nuking or polluting ourselves out of existence first--won't take Robert Heinlein's suggestion and call this "the crazy years."