When did Michael Schiavo stop being the bad guy?
My dad has CNN on whenever he's home and awake, so I was lucky enough to see House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Bugman-Sugarland) talking about how Congress would have to step in to prevent a court from killing Terri Schiavo. Wait a minute. I thought it was Ms. Schiavo's husband, not a judge, who had fought to get her nutrition and hydration tubes removed. Why was DeLay claiming that the legislature was having to act to stop a judiciary run amok?
Then the inevitable unscientific poll went up: Who should make the decision about ending life support? Seven percent said the courts, two percent said Congress, twenty percent said her parents and sixty-something percent said her husband.
Now I get it; activist judges are a much easier political target than spouses.
(And if anyone's curious about the termination-of-support cases I was following, both families represented by the same attorney: the man on life support has until Wednesday to be accepted by another facility, while baby Sun died Tuesday moments after the removal of his breathing tube.)
UPDATE: Perhaps the poll-taking public just wanted to avoid headlines like the one currently on msn.com: "GOP wins Schiavo deal." If Ms. Schiavo's fate wasn't a political football before, it certainly is now that we're thinking in terms of which side is "winning."
There's an ABC/WP scientific poll that matches those numbers:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/3/19/13532/0274
I wonder why Tom DeLay let Sun Hudson die. He is supposed to represent Texas, right?
Posted by: Steve Brady at March 19, 2005 06:27 PM