Outcome likely to reverberate as Congress returns
WASHINGTON -- Right-to-live conservatives, frustrated by court rulings in the Terri Schiavo case, have vowed to force two issues to the top of the congressional agenda when members return from recess next week: new laws restricting when spouses or relatives can end life-sustaining care for an incapacitated person, and new Senate rules barring filibusters that Democrats have used to stall President Bush's judicial nominees.
Spurred by intense public attention to the Schiavo case, as many as 10 state legislatures around the country have enacted laws this year designed to block termination of life-support measures unless specific conditions are met, including written consent from the patient and the exhaustion of all legal appeals. Conservative Christian activists and their allies in Congress have urged legislators to follow suit.
''Terri's will to live should serve as an inspiration and impetus for action," Representative James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said yesterday. ''I am hopeful the Senate will join the House in passing the Protection of Incapacitated Persons Act to assist those whose circumstances mirror Terri Schiavo's and ensure others with disabilities do not receive the same treatment by our legal system."
Gary Bauer, president of American Family Values and a former GOP presidential candidate, said that when Congress returns, conservative Republicans and some Democratic advocates for the disabled ''may try to fashion some sort of legal guidelines that would make this sort of case less likely to happen in the future. There are quite a few [people] interested in raising the bar" on when life support can be withdrawn.
''Whether the politicians are ready or not for this, I think the country is ready for a national debate on those issues -- where life ends, where life begins," he said.
John C. Green, director of the nonpartisan Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron, said Schiavo's death ''will serve to energize the conservative Christians" for some time. ''It speaks to the kind of values they like to see in public policy," he said.
But as the attention subsides with Schiavo's death, the case ''diminishes as an issue that most people care about," Green said. ''Our attention will be on other things." Still, political analysts agree that the case will remain a potent banner issue for religious conservatives.
They also renewed their call to get more conservative judges on the court, and urged Senate majority leader Bill Frist to eliminate filibusters to force approve-or-deny votes on Bush's judicial nominees -- called the ''nuclear option" because it is likely to take partisan conflict to a new level of intensity. Democrats promise to answer that move by slowing most business of the Senate to a standstill, guaranteeing gridlock.
According to a statement by House majority leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican, Schiavo's death ''happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change. The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today. Today we grieve, we pray, and we hope to God this fate never befalls another."
But Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said Republicans and Christian conservatives are ignoring the basics of democracy: checks and balances and separation of powers. In a text prepared for a speech he gave in Boston yesterday, Kennedy said Bush and conservatives want to gut the independent judiciary by repeatedly nominating ''a few radical, ideological individuals whose views are outside the mainstream of judicial thought -- and in the Senate majority's threatened use of the so-called 'nuclear option' to railroad these nominations through the Senate by cutting off our right to debate."
When the Schiavo case went to federal court, the judges who decided the case defied political categories, irritating conservatives. The appeals of her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, were heard by both Democratic and Republican appointees. 