"Congress in Disgrace" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Congress in Disgrace

How low can they go? I’m talking about our political leaders. Starting with Tom DeLay. His grandstanding on the Terri Schiavo case is as slimy a perversion of Congressional power as we have ever witnessed in this county. Under fire after the revelations of a series of "ethical lapses," the House Majority Leader is diverting attention from his miscreance by mounting a hell-for-leather campaign to keep the Florida woman alive, despite her condition.

His manipulation of the right-wing pseudo-Christians who lack the intellect to discern how they are being used is being abetted by the Speaker of the House and a cadre of shamelessly dark Republicans who lack the character to break with this degenerate in this, maybe the worst in his history of ugly acts.

The woman has being lying virtually dead for 15 years. She was a bulimic. She did serious damage to her body, causing her heart to stop. With no blood going to the brain, she lapsed into a no-recovery-possible vegetative state. Her husband has been fighting to pull the feeding tube that keeps his wife alive. For seven years, her parents fought him to a stand-off.

Friday, after all appeals were exhausted, the tube was pulled. But not before DeLay shoved Congress into the middle of the death scene. Apparently the neo-cons, who fought for the sanctity of marriage so zealously during the campaign last year, don’t think much of a husband demanding a decent end for his wife. For these hypocrites, it’s now life at any cost, life in any state, except when you’re at war or executing retarded teenagers.

Their rhetoric drips with blood. Said the Senate Majority leader, himself a former surgeon, "If we don't act, there's a good chance that a living human being would be starved to death in a matter of days."

The Senate passed a bill that would have allowed the parents to seek federal court intervention. But the House passed a broader bill that would have allowed federal judges to intervene in other dead-end cases. Since the two chambers then adjourned for a two-week Easter Break, they couldn’t reconcile the differences between the two measures.

The House leaders blamed the donkeys of the upper chamber for passing the more restrictive bill, charging, "As Terri Schiavo lays helpless in Florida, one day away from the unthinkable and unforgivable, the Senate Democrats refused to join Republicans to act on her behalf."

Normally, constitutionally, these matters have been left to the states. And yes, normally the Republicans are all up and behind state’s rights, except when they seize the opportunity to blow the louder horn of pathos.

Indeed, not procedure, precedent, nor the Constitution were going to stop DeLay. He knew he was dealing with a gutless opposition. On Friday, he had a House committee issue a subpoena for Schiavo to appear before them in two weeks, trying to force Florida officials to keep her alive until after the Congress returns from Easter recess. But the local judge denied their jurisdiction and the tube was pulled.

On Saturday, the Senate gave the House permission to call itself into special session to ratify their the case-specific measure which would dump the measure into the federal courts. The House met in special session Sunday but immediately adjourned because they needed a unanimous vote and there were at least a few Democrats willing to prevent that.

Said one Democratic Representative, "What the majority is proposing to do here is to take a tragic personal situation and make it grotesque."

He was not of the Democratic leadership, however. In fact, nowhere in the headlines I saw nor the articles I that read did I find the names Reid, Pelosi or Dean. I might have missed them, but their names certainly weren’t prominent, and they should have been.

The Democrats are so cowardly that they won’t stand up against this obscene abuse of power. They won’t declare themselves for states rights, for family rights, for marital rights -- for goodness sakes, for basic human decency. Even with 87% of Americans saying they’d prefer to be allowed to die under these circumstances.

What a perfect opportunity to stake out the moral high ground, but these asses just can’t get it right. Instead, they allowed themselves to be blatantly, embarrassingly slandered by DeLay, who said Sunday, "Time is not on Terri Schiavo's side. The few remaining objecting House Democrats have so far cost Mrs. Schiavo two meals already today."

As of this writing Sunday evening, the House is scheduling a vote for early Monday morning to bypass reason and send this matter to the courts. Meanwhile, the Bush-Lite, never one not to take advantage of a political opportunity, tore himself away from ranching and rushed back from Crawford to be ready to sign whatever bill might be eructated from Capitol Hill the moment it’s passed. He wouldn’t want to cost Mrs. Schiavo another meal, so to speak.

The Republicans have a hot potato which they are trying to toss into the judiciary’s lap. This, despite the fact that 19 judges have already heard the case. But even if they ultimately manage to get the federal courts involved, it will likely only be to prolong the inevitable. And probably not for long since the Supreme Court has already said they don’t have jurisdiction.

So the ugly tragedy is drawn out, both for the family and friends in Florida, and for the American people who are confronted by a degenerate leadership that fiddles with the Constitution, plucks the heartland strings of faux morality, and lets a nation burn.

There is a final irony. The Republicans are trying to feed a woman who is brain dead, whose condition came about because her brain had the idea that she was better off starving herself. Notice, too, that right-wingers are appealing to people’s emotions not their intellect. And the Democrats don’t have the guts to make a case from common sense.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.