Forgive me if I make any mistakes in my reaction to this post by Mark R. Levin. After all, I’m doing this as a hobby, but he get paid to write crap like this :

The right to live, or more specifically, the right not to be killed, is a fundamental right. And it’s a right recognized in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence.¹ So ingrained in our society is the notion of life, that the 8th Amendment prohibits “cruel and usual punishment” (even short of death)² and the 14th Amendment prohibits states from depriving any person of life without due process of law.³ This has nothing to do with federalism, unless you ignore the 8th and 14th Amendments. (Unlike the Left, that contorts the 14th Amendment, I’m recognizing its literal meaning.)

What really offends the Left is Congress asserting its constitutional power over a court, and not in service to the liberal agenda. Article III specifically empowers Congress to determine the jurisdiction of the federal courts, which is all it did today.⁴ It authorized a federal court to determine whether Terri Schiavo’s due process rights and the right not be subject to cruel and unusual punishment were properly protected by a state court.⁵ In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decided on its own that abortion was a federal question, not to be left to the states, without any constitutional basis whatsoever.⁶ It preempted every state court and legislature (and Congress, for that matter). And the Left celebrates this decision.

Don’t you love it when professional pundits quickly spout off a bunch of constitutional references? If the shoe was on the other foot, would there be any doubt that this same post would have been about the evil Congress trying to destroy the concept of states rights?

^{1 : If you’re still living under the quaint illusion that the Declaration of Independence (specifically the “all men are created equal” part) has any legal basis whatsoever, go to your local library and have them find you a good book about the abolitionist movement.
2 : It would make sense to quote the 8th Amendment if Terri Schiavo were facing execution and not euthanasia. Where was all this 8th Amendment love when Abu Ghraib was all over the news?
3 : The 14th amendment states “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”, but the State isn’t directly making any decisions in this matter. They’re just deciding who is allowed to make the decisions, the husband or the parents.
4 : Is that really all it did? How routine is it for the Congress to come back from a recess to pass a law relating to the jurisdiction of the federal courts in regards to a single case?
5 : Terri Schiavo’s due process rights?! Is Mark Levin smoking crack? Mrs. Schiavo isn’t a plaintiff or defendant in any of this mess. She’s just caught in the middle. What Congress did was pass a law that allows the parents to appeal in a federal court.
6 : Nobody who writes about politics for a living should be able to get away with this “without any constitutional basis whatsoever” horseshit. The constitutional basis for Roe vs. Wade was the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut which determined that there is a constitutional “right of privacy”.}