WASHINGTON, March 19 – Congressional leaders reached a compromise Saturday on legislation to force the case of Terri Schiavo into federal court, an extraordinary intervention intended to prolong the life of the brain-damaged woman whose condition has reignited a painful national debate over when medical treatment should be withdrawn.

Top lawmakers in both the House and the Senate said they hoped to pass the compromise bill as early as Sunday. They said it would allow Ms. Schiavo’s parents to ask a federal judge to restore her feeding tube on the ground that their daughter’s constitutional rights were being violated by the withholding of nutrition needed to keep her alive.

The White House announced late Saturday that President Bush, who was vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., would make an unscheduled return on Sunday to Washington, where he would remain until early Monday in anticipation of signing the measure.

Conservative lawmakers scrambled to find a way to override a Florida judge’s order Friday to remove Ms. Schiavo’s feeding tube. Her husband, Michael Schiavo, has maintained for years that his wife would not want to be kept alive in her current state by artificial means.

Ms. Schiavo suffered extensive brain damage when her heart stopped briefly 15 years ago due to a potassium deficiency; she remains in what doctors have testified is a “persistent vegetative state.”
Full Article: nytimes.com

How, Constitutionally speaking, is it possible to remove a case from a state court and throw it into a federal one? Well, we didn’t think the Supremes would hear the Bush vs. Gore case either.
What is particularly grotesque about all this is having to listen to right-wing Republicans pleading for ‘the sanctity of human life.’ Since when? Thousands and thousands Iraqis and Afghanis don’t bother them. Torture doesn’t concern them. They are even willing to tolerate the deaths of 1500 American soldiers, as long as they are not their children.
They apparently believe that they should be the sole arbiters of who will live and who will die.

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