What’s Terri Schiavo’s full name? If the various legal documents I’ve seen posted online are correct, her full name is Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo. This would fit into the common practice among married women to take their husband’s surname and make their maiden name a middle name. The reason I mention this is because I’ve been noticing more and more of her “defenders” refer to her as “Terri Schindler-Schiavo”. Now the motivation for awkwardly throwing her maiden name into the equation is pretty obvious, but here’s a semi-rhetorical question : Did Terri every use a hyphenated last name on her checks, bills, driver’s license, etc? Considering that the hyphen doesn’t appear in court records, it seems that the hyphen is an invention by those who want to draw a line of seperation (however slight it may be) between Terri and her husband. My mind boggles at the notion that the people who are the most vocal about respecting her wishes can’t be bothered to even refer to Terri Schiavo by her chosen name.

It looks like the people of Ohio were so excited at the prospect of discriminating against gay people that they inadvertently aided someone who beat the shit out of his live-in girlfriend :

A judge has ruled that Ohio’s new constitutional ban on same-sex marriage prohibits unmarried people from being able to file domestic violence charges, a decision that has prompted an immediate appeal by prosecutors.

Judges and others across the country have been waiting for a ruling on how Ohio’s ban on same-sex marriage, among the nation’s broadest, would affect the state’s 25-year-old domestic violence law, which previously wasn’t limited to married people.
. . .
His public defender, David Magee, had asked the judge to throw out the charge because of the new wording in Ohio’s constitution that prohibits any state or local government from enforcing a law that would “create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals.”

Prior to the amendment’s approval, courts applied the domestic violence law by defining a family as including an unmarried couple living together as would a husband and wife, the judge said. The new amendment banning same-sex marriage no longer allows that.

This is one of those stories that would be funny if I didn’t find every aspect of it sickening and offensive.

Here’s an interesting bill on its way from the party that’s worked overtime to limit your ability to sue people and businesses that harm you (via Metafilter) :

Republicans on the House Choice and Innovation Committee voted along party lines Tuesday to pass a bill that aims to stamp out ?leftist totalitarianism? by ?dictator professors? in the classrooms of Florida?s universities.

The Academic Freedom Bill of Rights, sponsored by Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala, passed 8-to-2 despite strenuous objections from the only two Democrats on the committee.

The bill has two more committees to pass before it can be considered by the full House.

While promoting the bill Tuesday, Baxley said a university education should be more than ?one biased view by the professor, who as a dictator controls the classroom,? as part of ?a misuse of their platform to indoctrinate the next generation with their own views.?

The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative ?serious academic theories? that may disagree with their personal views.

According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.

For the record, this is only in Florida for now, but you know the old saying “As goes Florida, so goes the long, twisted road that leads straight to Hell”…or something like that….

Y’know, I can’t shake my fascination with the Terri Schiavo case. Not the actual case per se, since I didn’t give a shit last week, but the political maneuvering involved and what effect it may have on the Republican party. That said, I’ve spent the last couple days trying to come up with something semi-original to say about the situation. My original plan for this post was to link to all the disgruntled conservatives and throw in the standard “It looks like they’re finally starting to get it.” Then to mix things up a bit I was thinking of linking approvingly to this poll that’s appeared on every other liberal blog and figure out a way to include the phrase “jump the shark”. That would have been a great post, but I changed my mind for two reasons :

Writing a meta-post about the process of writing a post would make me look smarter than I really am and be quicker to write. Why bother with finding interesting ways to restate the obvious when you can just type stream of conscious bullshit and pretend to deconstruct the post writing process instead?

More importantly, the whole “even conservatives can see how horrible things are” thing is a bunch of crap anyways. I remember reading conservative columnists grapple with themselves over the 2000 election fiasco, Bush’s tax cuts, Enron, the Iraq war, missing WMD’s, the Medicare bill, Abu Ghraib, Administration propaganda, etc. but in the end their criticism doesn’t do much good if they’re still willing to support the Republican party.

For all the crocodile tears shed over the death of traditional conservatism, it should probably be noted that the conservatives themselves are to blame for letting their party go off course without paying any political price. Traditional conservatism is on life support right now and they’re married to a political party that wants to pull the plug. Unless they’re okay with being put out of their misery, they’d be better off getting a divorce. (I’m going to stop now before this metaphor completely falls apart)

This letter from that guy who made the Jesus snuff film cracks me up (via Pandagon) :

To see my favorite part of the letter, click on the image and look at the upper left corner. Apparently Mel Gibson cared so much about Terri Schiavo’s fate that he had one of his handlers fax over to TerrisFight.org while he ate lunch at Drago’s Seafood Restaurant.

Well, there’s a slight problem (via Atrios) with the Terri Schiavo “law” that the President signed this morning. The slight problem is this pesky bit from the Constitution :

Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business; but a smaller Number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide.

Which is especially relevant given this news :

In the weekend scramble, U.S. House of Representatives members who had scattered for a two-week Easter recess were called back to Washington and 261 of the House’s 435 members gave the measure well over the two-thirds majority required.

Only three members of the 100-member U.S. senate, however, were present to approve the measure by a voice vote.

No quorum when the law was “passed” means the law isn’t constitutional. Period.

Needless to say, this one shouldn’t be hard case for Federal Judge James Whittemore to decide. Despite all the public handwringing by the self-righteous Republicans who cut their vacations short, the federal courts still don’t have any jurisdiction in this matter. The federal judges should refuse to hear the case further and strike down this dangerous little law before it becomes an unwieldy precedent.

UPDATE : Okay, it looks like the joke might actually be on all of us. Here’s what the senate’s homepage says about quorums :

The Constitution requires a majority of Senators (51) for a quorum. Often, fewer Senators are actually present on the floor, but the senate presumes that a quorum is present unless the contrary is shown by a roll call vote or quorum call.

So, the senate is free to break the rules until someone points out that the rules are being broken??

Dahlia Lithwick has a devastating takedown of the Congressional cretins who stepped into the Terri Schiavo case :

This morning’s decision by Congress and President Bush?to authorize new federal legislation that will obliterate years of state court litigation, and justify re-inserting a feeding tube into Terri Schiavo, based on new and illusory federal constitutional claims?is not about law. It is congressional activism, plain and simple; legislative overreaching and hubris taken to absurd extremes.

Let’s be clear: The piece of legislation passed late last night, the so-called “Palm Sunday Compromise,” has nothing whatever to do with the rule of law. The rule of law in this country holds that this is a federalist system?in which private domestic matters are litigated in state, not federal courts. The rule of law has long provided that such domestic decisions are generally made by competent spouses, as opposed to parents, elected officials, popular referendum, or the demands of Randall Terry. The rule of law also requires a fundamental separation of powers?in which legislatures do not override final, binding court decisions solely because the outcome is not the one they like. The rule of law requires comity between state and federal courts?wherein each respects and upholds the jurisdiction and authority of the other. The rule of law requires that we look skeptically at legislation aimed at mucking around with just one life to the exclusion of any and all similarly situated individuals.
[. . .]
Members of Congress have apparently also had super-analytical powers conferred upon them, as well. senate Majority Leader, and heart surgeon, Bill Frist felt confident last week?after reviewing an hour of videotape?in offering a medical diagnosis of Schiavo’s condition, blithely second-guessing the court-appointed neurologists who evaluated her for days and weeks. His colleagues are similarly self-appointed neurological experts. Years of painstaking litigation, assessment, and evaluation by state courts are dismissed by Tom DeLay as the activist doings of a “little judge sitting in a state district court in Florida.” Only the most extraordinary levels of congressional hubris could allow a group of elected citizens to substitute their personal medical, legal, and ethical judgments for those of the doctors, judges, and guardians who have been intimately involved with this heartbreakingly sad case for years.
[. . .]
This is not a slippery-slope case, where it’s a short hop from “executing” those in persistent vegetative conditions to killing anyone with a disability. This is a case in which an established right-to-refuse-treatment claim, litigated for years up and down through the appeals courts, is being thwarted by parents with no custodial claim to their child. By stepping in merely to sow doubt as to whom Terri Schiavo’s proper custodian might be, rather than creating some new constitutional right to a “culture of life,” Congress has simply called the existing legal regime into doubt without establishing a new one. This new law offers no clarity about what the new federal claims might be. It just forum-shops for a more tractable judge.

There is no legal basis for the extra-constitutional grandstanding that marked the first abbreviated vacation of George Bush’s entire Presidency (that includes both wars, 9/11, intelligence reform, etc.). This was just an easy way to exploit a dying woman in order to score some cheap political points with the religious people who keep giving them money.

By the way, if any of this shit ever happens to me, please pull the plug. Once my body’s cold, let the organ harvesters, medical students, etc. take whatever they want. Cremate anything that’s left over, toss it in the ocean, and go buy yourselves a drink with whatever you found in my wallet. But…..

If I get into the situation as the result of medical malpractice, corporate negligence, or some other dastardly (and preventable) means, keep me alive long enough to turn my situation into a media circus. Since it seems to be the only way cases like this get any attention, make sure to send every videotape or photograph that you may have of me to every news outlet you can find. Use the resulting orgy of coverage to get some attention to the horrible nexus of insurance interests, pharmaceutical companies, and bribed political interests that ensures that millions of Americans (unlike their peers in Japan, Canada, Britain, etc.) without healthcare of any sort. If you find it necessary to split into two opposing camps to pontificate endlessly about “What Greg would have wanted”, please try to keep religion out of it, okay?

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”.}

Stealing from Digby :

By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient’s family’s wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother’s wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.

Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo’s care thus far.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schiavo’s because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.

And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.

Those who don’t read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is “stepping in to save Terry Schiavo” mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.

Like I said before, people are dying of preventable causes every goddamn day. Where’s the self-righteous outrage over that??? The way politicians are jumping on this bandwagon is fucking sickening.