A Vast Right Wing Conspiricy . . . How the Bush's and their GOP Party Meddling brough this to the Federal Level
Hillary told you so . . .
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When a judge set last Friday as the deadline for removing Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, Ken Connor, a Florida trial lawyer and prominent Christian conservative who represented Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida on this issue, decided to appeal to a higher power, Congress.
He turned to an old acquaintance, Representative Dave Weldon, a Florida Republican and doctor, in a long-shot effort to persuade Congress to intervene. Convicted murderers have more chances to appeal to the federal courts than patients who are incapacitated, Mr. Connor argued.
"Don't we want to accord the same protections to the handicapped and disabled that we do to death row inmates?" he asked.
That was three weeks ago. The plans hatched by Mr. Connor and Dr. Weldon eventually snowballed into Congress's marathon weekend session, resulting in the recall of more than 260 members of the House from their spring vacations to try to preserve the life of one brain-damaged woman who has spent 15 years unable to speak, feed herself or move much more than her eyes.
Their success was the culmination of a two-year campaign by social conservatives who had been building support for the cause, along with the diligent efforts of Ms. Schiavo's parents and brother. Senator Mel Martinez, a newly elected Republican of Florida who is Mr. Connor's former college roommate, also played an influential role.
Senate Democrats were helpful as well. Some were reticent about opposing the Schiavo measure because of the highly charged emotions surrounding it. But Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who is an author of the Americans With Disabilities Act, pressed hard for the measure and helped to assuage the states' rights concerns of other Democrats, and the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, ultimately supported the bill as well.
Equally important were the last-minute decisions of two of the most powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill - the Senate leader, Bill Frist, and the House leader, Tom DeLay - each of whom threw the full weight of their offices behind the effort.
On Friday, as the leaders of both chambers scrambled to try to stop the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube, Mr. DeLay, a Texas Republican, turned his attention to social conservatives gathered at a Washington hotel and described what he viewed as the intertwined struggle to save Ms. Schiavo, expand the conservative movement and defend himself against accusations of ethical lapses.
"One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," Mr. DeLay told a conference organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. A recording of the event was provided by the advocacy organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
"This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others," Mr. DeLay said.
Mr. DeLay complained that "the other side" had figured out how "to defeat the conservative movement," by waging personal attacks, linking with liberal organizations and persuading the national news media to report the story. He charged that "the whole syndicate" was "a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in."
The day before, Senator Frist, the Tennessee Republican whose past includes a career as a heart-lung transplant surgeon and whose future might include a run for president, addressed the same group by telephone. Even though the Senate's daylong budget debate kept him at the Capitol, he told the group that he had already talked to a neurologist who had examined Ms. Schiavo. Dr. Frist said he had serious questions about her diagnosis.
"I promise you that I will not leave tonight or tomorrow until we do everything we can and ultimately save the life by preventing the starvation of Terri Schiavo," he said, according to the recording.
Ms. Schiavo is not the first brain-damaged patient to become the subject of national debate. In 1976, a New Jersey court ruled in favor of the removal of a respirator from a brain-damaged women, Karen Ann Quinlan. In 1990, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Nancy Cruzan that a feeding tube could be withdrawn.
But in Ms. Schiavo's case, unlike those, her condition divides her family. Her parents and her brother, Bobby Schindler, dispute statements by her husband, Michael Schiavo, about her wishes and her doctors' diagnosis that she is in a persistent vegetative state. Her family doggedly publicized her case, disseminating homemade videos over the Internet and elsewhere that appear to show Ms. Schiavo smiling and responding to family members - helping to build sympathy for her.
That effort continued on Monday evening, when the Family Research Council posted on its Web site a recording of a moaning woman it said was Ms. Schiavo responding to her father's voice on Friday afternoon.
In 2003, her plight became a cause in conservative and anti-abortion circles thanks partly to Governor Bush, who ordered doctors not to remove her feeding tube and picked Mr. Connor, a former president of the Family Research Council, to represent him.
By last summer, Ms. Schiavo had become so celebrated among Christian conservatives that her brother was a guest of honor at a rally for Catholics at the Republican National Convention in New York.
Eventually, the National Right to Life Committee worked with Dr. Weldon to sponsor a broad bill that would grant some incapacitated patients certain rights to appeal to federal courts. Two weeks ago, Dr. Weldon asked Mr. Martinez to join him. Mr. Martinez, an ally of Governor Bush's and a former member of President Bush's cabinet, called Mr. Connor the next day.
"Man, why didn't you tell me about this?" Mr. Martinez recalled saying.
At the same time, Dr. Frist had been watching the case from afar. On March 12, he was in Florida to headline a Republican fund-raising dinner, where he ran into a Republican state lawmaker, Daniel Webster, who told him "the only way to slow this down would be at our level," Dr. Frist said Monday.
By this time, Dr. Frist had already reviewed court affidavits and a videotape of Ms. Schiavo, and was troubled, he said. "We're making a decision to pull a tube this week without a clear-cut diagnosis, or what in my mind was a clear-cut diagnosis," he said.
Then, Wednesday morning, Mr. Martinez said, Governor Bush called and delivered the news from Florida's end. "He told me, it is not going to happen here, you need to do what you can."
What followed, over the next several days, was a pointed back-and-forth between the House and the Senate, with friction among Republicans. In the House, Mr. DeLay immediately introduced a version of the Weldon bill. House Democrats declined to try to block the measure, said Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, because they did not expect the Senate to act.
But Dr. Frist instructed his staff to write a "private relief" bill, directed only at Ms. Schiavo. It passed Thursday with the agreement of Senate Democrats, but only after the House had adjourned. At one point, Dr. Frist said, he called the House speaker, Representative J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, to tell him "there was absolutely no way," the broader House bill could pass. Dr. Frist also warned the House Republican leadership that he would not agree to adjourn the Congress until the Schiavo matter was resolved - a parliamentary move that, he said, "kept the lights on and the door open."
As tensions festered among Republicans, Democratic aides passed out an unsigned one-page memorandum that they said had been distributed to Senate Republicans. "This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue," the memorandum said.
Dr. Frist and other Republicans denied having seen the memorandum, and Dr. Frist said he "condemned it as soon as I heard about it."
By Saturday, it became clear that the only option was for the House to approve some version of the Senate bill. Dr. Frist, in New Hampshire for a political event, called Mr. Reid, who was in Jerusalem, to make some minor changes. Ultimately, the House backed down, accepting cosmetic changes to the Senate bill it had opposed, clearing the way for the measure to be approved. The final vote came early Monday, just past midnight.
Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which taped the Family Research Council meeting, said he was appalled. He called the effort "a cynical political ploy" to play to the Republicans' conservative Christian base.
As the debate closed on the House floor, the man who started it all, Dr. Weldon, appeared to have mixed emotions. He said he worried that by limiting the bill to Ms. Schiavo, the Congress had left it vulnerable to legal challenges.
"This," he said, "is what I basically didn't want to do."