Truth - Al Franken [63]
Already, Kennedy had incurred the wrath of right-thinking pro-life conservatives by casting the tie-breaking vote in Roper v. Simmons, outlawing the death penalty for people who committed their capital crimes while still minors. The right, who, like Tom Coburn, supported killing baby killers as well as baby-killers, was most incensed by Kennedy’s acknowledgment of “the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty.” Somehow, foreigners had infiltrated our highest court. World government was clearly just around the corner. As Tom DeLay would thunder on Fox News Radio:
We’ve got Justice Kennedy writing decisions based upon international law, not the Constitution of the United States. That’s just outrageous.
He was right. Thomas Jefferson’s call for “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” appeared in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. But that wasn’t Kennedy’s only unforgivable sin, according to DeLay:
And not only that, he said in session that he does his own research on the Internet. That is just incredibly outrageous.
I must admit that we at The Al Franken Show puzzled over that one for almost eleven minutes until we concluded that DeLay must believe that the Internet is composed entirely of porn.
By the time Kennedy issued the Supreme Court’s second refusal to consider the case (with no dissent from Scalia, Rehnquist, or Thomas), Schindler v. Schiavo had been reviewed by more than three dozen judges and justices on the state and federal level in the course of seven years of adjudication.
By now, Americans weren’t just disgusted by it, they were sick of it. And above all, they were sick of Congress. If nobody in the country had had any real problems, perhaps they would have forgiven their legislators for dropping everything to pursue this macabre charade. But between rising gas prices, the health care crisis, crumbling schools, war, and for those who remembered, the now-forgotten threat of terrorism, it was hard to conclude that Congress and the President had the same priorities as the people who hired them. And their poll ratings were sinking faster than a mini-sub going to explore the Titanic. In mid-March, at the height of the Schiavo frenzy, Congress enjoyed a 34 percent approval rating. No national poll had them cracking 40 percent during the month of April. By May 23, after the “nuclear option” fight over the Senate filibuster, only 17 percent of Americans answered “yes” when asked if Congress “shares your priorities.”
Health care, in particular, consistently ranks as a top priority for most Americans. Poll after poll has found that Americans favor universal health coverage by a two-to-one margin. Conservative Republican politicians also see health care as a crucial issue, but in a different way. They want to ease the suffering of insurance companies. Perhaps because the health insurance industry gives them so much money and because trial lawyers who defend injured patients tend to give money to Democrats, Karl Rove decided long ago that “tort reform” should be near the top of the Republican agenda, even higher than the development and deployment of Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators, popularly known as “bunker busters.” And Tom DeLay and Bill Frist have been right there with Rove. Never mind that much of Terri Schiavo’s medical care had been financed by medical malpractice awards whose value would have been slashed if DeLay, Frist, and Rove had had their way.
As I said above, many Americans have faced wrenching decisions not so different from the one faced by Michael Schiavo. On March 27, the Los Angeles Times wrote about another family’s private tragedy—one in which, as in the Schiavo case, Tom DeLay played an important role. But a much less controversial one. In 1988, DeLay, along with his mother, his aunt, and the rest of the family, decided not to take extraordinary measures to prolong the life of Tom’s father, Charles Ray DeLay.