Persistent Legislative State

As of Wednesday, 48 people had been arrested outside Terri Schiavo's hospice in Florida. Many of them bore bread and water as desperate gestures to save the dying woman's life. Too bad the protesters would have only harmed her, as she, unable to eat solids, would have choked.

The circus surrounding Schiavo's sad story has been, like the arrested protesters, largely symbolic. In a vegetative state, Schiavo, who has spent the last 15 years on a gastric feeding tube, had been given no chance at rehabilitation by court-appointed doctors. With no living will, her husband has argued that she would not have wanted to live in her present state. But her parents, interpreting her reflexive motions as cognitively aware responses, claim Schiavo will recover and are willing to become her legal guardians. But the courts have consistently ruled in favor of her husband, Michael Schiavo. On March 18, her feeding tube was removed.

But the Republican-controlled Congress decided to turn this 15-year family tragedy into 15 minutes of media fame. In the House of Representatives, Majority Leader Tom DeLay headed up the effort at the behest of Schiavo's parents, denouncing the removal of the tube as "an act of barbarism" and characterizing the recent court decisions as a "moral and legal tragedy."

But 16 years ago, DeLay's family faced a similar choice. His father had suffered brain damage in a tragic tram accident. DeLay's family, like Michael Schiavo, decided that Charles DeLay-who, like Schiavo, was without a living will-would have rather died than live in a comatose state. The family withheld necessary medical treatment and Charles DeLay died soon thereafter.

This is the same Tom DeLay who helped ram a law through Congress that specifically allowed Schiavo's parents to file an appeal in federal court in the name of "building a culture of life," as President Bush put it. Two congressional committees even subpoenaed Schiavo to testify in hopes that a judge would order the reinsertion of her feeding tube to preserve her as evidence.

Further raising the hypocrisy quotient, in 1990 DeLay's family sued a manufacturer whose negligence they claimed caused the tram to careen out of control. The wrongful death suit, which included an affidavit filed by DeLay, was settled in 1993 for an undisclosed sum, believed to be $250,000.

This is the same Tom DeLay who has railed against "frivolous, parasitic lawsuits" that "kill jobs" and has been a leading advocate of tort reform that would ban suits like those his own family filed. Schiavo's medical bills, it should be noted, have been paid in part by a medical malpractice settlement.

Despite DeLay's efforts, according to a CBS survey 82 percent of Americans agree that Congress' intervention was wrong-including a startling 68 percent of self-identified evangelical Christians.

I certainly don't know what the result of the Schiavo case should have been, and more importantly, it wasn't for me-or Congress-to decide. But I do know that double-talk politicians like Tom DeLay wrongly used the woman's feeding tube for political sustenance. It was a family matter. It should have remained a family matter.

Perhaps the bigger story is how willing the Republican Party, the so-called standard-bearer of small government, has been to intervene in family affairs. Though most Republicans still oppose government intervention in the workplace, more and more are arguing for an invasion of bedroom affairs.

Think about it. Abortion? The Republican Party wants to regulate that out of existence. Gay marriage? Forget federalism, President Bush and co. want the Constitution to ban Uncle Sam from settling down with another man. Privacy? The PATRIOT Act is here to defend national, not civil, liberty. Cable TV? Just censor it. Terri Schiavo? Write a law for a single person, traipse on the separation of powers and impede state sovereignty-all at the same time.

Andrew Sullivan, a gay conservative columnist, recently wrote that the Schiavo case demonstrates that "We're getting to the point when conservatism has become a political philosophy that believes that government-at the most distant level-has the right to intervene in almost anything to achieve the right solution."

He's right. The Republican Party no longer stands for a lack of regulation, but rather regulation that fits their world view. And sadly, Schiavo was caught in the middle of this political storm.

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