Conservatives are being excoriated for hypocrisy in the Schiavo matter

National Review, April 25, 2005

* Conservatives are being excoriated for hypocrisy in the Schiavo matter. Those who supported congressional intervention to keep Terri Schiavo alive are said to have betrayed their principles on limited government, the sanctity of marriage, federalism, and the rule of law. Now people of good will can surely disagree about this case.

No less a conservative authority than William E Buckley Jr. opposed the congressional action. But it is instructive that he did not do so because of the supposed inconsistency of that action with limited government, the sanctity of marriage, etc. No conservative believes that government can take a position of principled abstention on matters of life and death; and no sane person of any political stripe believes that assisted suicide should be wholly unregulated. The marriage issue, meanwhile, was a distraction. If euthanasia is a form of unjustified killing, as most of the conservative protesters believed, then it could hardly be among the prerogatives of a spouse. Its invocation therefore begs the question. Congress can be faulted for intervening in one tragic case rather than creating a general policy. But Congress did not face a question of whether the federal government should get involved at all. The Supreme Court--a branch of the federal government--had already intervened in a way that made Mrs. Schiavo's death far more likely. There are intelligent students of American government who believe that the rule of law requires Congress to defer to the courts, come what may. But most conservatives have never fallen into this camp. Whether or not Congress was right, there was no hypocrisy or even inconsistency here; the only betrayal was of strawmen.