Well Said

Tags: Robert Link, Tribe, ACS, HLPR

What follows is a paragraph from Professor Tribe's The Inverted Constitution: Presidential Hegemony and the Eclipse of Privacy at the fledgling (but awesome!) Harvard Law and Policy Review Online:

A year ago President Bush and Congress interrupted a mid-winter recess to descend on the nation's capital en masse to enact special legislation directing the federal courts to prevent the withdrawal of a feeding tube from a permanently comatose young woman named Terri Schiavo. This came after her guardian had persuaded the state courts of Florida that she would not have wanted to be kept alive in that hopelessly vegetative condition. The government moved with an urgency notably lacking in its response to Hurricane Katrina: the act of Congress directing that Terri Schiavo be kept on artificial life support was signed into law in a midnight White House ceremony just two days after it was first introduced in Congress. In that dramatic stroke, those wielding power in Washington revealed a self-righteousness that exposed the stark hypocrisy of their incantation of family values, federalism, and states' rights while exposing a stunning disregard for personal privacy, judicial independence, and the separation of powers. The values and priorities on display in that singular episode unfortunately previewed the kind of government that the Bush Constitution not only permits but also celebrates --- a government that talks the talk of democracy and a "culture of life" while it walks the walk of despotism to impose its vision upon those who would pursue a different path.

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Robert Link wrote

"This war, waged against a tactic too vague to locate even on a conceptual map and too vast ever to vanquish, is in fact less a well-defined pursuit than an excuse for violating basic rights and ignoring basic needs." Pretty close to what we're saying at http://repeal-aumf.org/inaug.html#why_not