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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:28
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quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Federal courts, bucko. The state court had no standing. |
"I've had two different reports of this. I looked up the transcript, Michael Schiavo on Larry King Live saying that he never knew what Terri wanted yet the courts made this decision based on Schiavo saying that she did want this or did not want to be fed by feeding tube. So nothing has really changed here, the focal point, however, in terms of the way the issue is being debated and argued by the people on both sides of the issue. But one of the things that I mentioned last week to try to call people's attention to this and just, you know, engage people's memory just a little bit, remember during the Clinton administration we have the two examples of Elian Gonzales. And in that case the Reno justice department basically just said (raspberry) to a court ruling that, "We're going to go get him anyway," and the Waco invasion. Let's not forget what happened there with the Waco invasion -- and this has all led to a lot of pressure being applied to Jeb Bush. I live in Florida, and you don't have to live here and understand it or know it, but there's all kinds of pressure on Governor Bush. "Just walk in there and use his executive authority and power as governor to take her out of there. Take her someplace and reinsert the feeding tube," and he insists he can't. He insists he doesn't have the power, he insists he will not violate a court order and so forth.
Yet the pressure is mounting, even some of the Schindler family spokespeople are asking the governor to do something, and he remains steadfast. In light of that, it might serve interesting to go back and look at the Elian Gonzales case and try to compare notes what happens when some people get legal rulings they don't like and what other people do when they get legal rulings they don't like. John Fund today has a piece called, "Selective Restraint" at OpinionJournal.com. I don't want to read the whole thing. He basically recapped some of the history of the Elian Gonzales piece, but let me just read these two short paragraphs to you. "The stalemate continued for another three months. On Thursday, April 20, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals--the same court that rejected the pleas of Terri Schiavo's parents last week--turned down the Justice Department's request to order Elian removed from the home of his Miami relatives. Moreover, the court expressed serious doubts about the Justice Department's reading of both the law and its own regulations, adding that Elian had made a 'substantial case on the merits' of his claim. It further established a record that Elain, 'although a young child, has expressed a wish that he not be returned to Cuba.'
"The Reno Justice Department acted the next day to short-circuit a legal process that was clearly going against it. On Good Friday evening, after all courts had closed for the day, the department obtained a 'search' warrant from a night-duty magistrate who was not familiar with the case, submitting a supporting affidavit that seriously distorted the facts. Armed with that dubious warrant, the INS's helmeted officers, assault rifles at the ready, burst into the home of Elian's relatives and snatched the screaming boy from a bedroom closet. Many local bystanders were tear-gassed even though they did nothing to block the raid. Elian was quickly returned to Cuba; because he was never able to meet with his lawyers a scheduled May 11 asylum hearing on his case in Atlanta became moot." And so he was gone, that was just it. And so the 11th circuit basically ruled against Reno, ruled against the justice department, and Reno said, "To hell with it," and went and got a search warrant for the home where Elian was, spirited the kid out of there with an armed INS agent, and, bam, sent him back down to Cuba. They just totally ignored the ruling and so that's why people are asking Jeb Bush, "What do you have to do? The precedent is there. You can do what you have to do." And they're saying to Governor Bush, "You wouldn't even be doing this. I mean, you wouldn't be making as egregious an error as Janet Reno did." We went back to our audio archives. We wanted to get some sound bites from the Elian Gonzales period just to sort of back up the John Fund story today. We have three of them. On April 6th of 2000, listen to deputy attorney general Eric Holder, he was hosting Reno's press briefing that week, and this is a portion of his opening statement.
HOLDER: I have a six-year-old daughter, and as a father, I cannot imagine the anguish of being separated from my daughter due to circumstances beyond my control. That is one reason that I believe reuniting Elian with his father is not only a matter of federal law, it is not a matter of immigration law, it is simply the right thing to do. A father and his son need to be together, and in the coming days, we will do all that we can to ensure that that happens.
RUSH: But the rulings went against them. Everybody knows where they stood on this. They were against Elian staying here and in support of going back to Cuba. Janet Reno is next. She was on Wolf Blitzer show April 9th of 2000, and Blitzer said, "Look, the vice president disagrees with you. He disagrees with the president. He makes the case, as do many others, let a family court decide custody since the family court is better experienced in dealing with these kinds of custodial issues than the Immigration and Naturalization Service is," and Janet Reno said...
RENO: But here we have a situation where a father has done a good job of raising his son to date, where a distant relative has, because of a tragedy, fallen to be responsible for him and in four months has formed a bond. That father and the sacred relationship between a father and son is what should be paramount in this situation.
RUSH: So the court, you know, a lot of people disagreeing with Reno at that point but it didn't matter. Now we go to April 20th, 2000. This is the day, April 20th of 2000 is the day the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta turned down the justice department's request to order Elian Gonzales removed from the home of his Miami relatives. They turned Janet Reno down. They said, "No, you can't go get him and he's not going to be removed from the home in Miami." So they had Greg Craig, who was Elian's lawyer, one of Clinton's impeachment lawyers, and who we now have learned guided Dan Rather through the question-and-answer session, the interview with Juan Miguel Gonzales, practically directed it. He was on the Today Show. Matt Lauer said, "This ruling leaves another even larger issue very cloudy, and that is whether a six-year-old boy has the right to speak for himself in an asylum case, and of course the government has said no, the father could only speak for the son, but the court seems to disagree," and this is what Greg Craig said.
CRAIG: Well, you know, in our jurisprudence there are very few things of this magnitude that a six-year-old can do. We don't let six-year-olds enter into contracts. We really don't hold six-year-olds responsible for torts or for criminal conduct. And it really is nonsensical to think that a six-year-old can make a determination as to whether he has a well founded fear of persecution, which is the test in an asylum case.
RUSH: So basically what Greg Craig was saying here, the ruling of the court didn't matter because it was wrong, the 11th circuit was wrong to give a six-year-old this kind of standing and so shortly after that they went in there and just ripped him out of there. I mean, people remember this, and it happened in Miami; it happened in Florida, and this is why so many people are just telling Jeb Bush to throw caution to the wind and go do what's right, just as Janet Reno and Eric Holder and Greg Craig all imposed what they thought was right and basically said "screw you" to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Imagine if that had happened in this case. The left back in the Elian Gonzales case was not upset with Reno, not upset with Craig, not upset with Eric Holder, and wasn't really upset with the INS, and they really weren't upset with the agent going in the way he did. There was more celebration that Elian was going to be returned to his father. There wasn't much criticism at all of the extrajudicial behavior of Janet Reno and the justice department and Greg Craig. So I just wanted to point this out because the left is sitting there arguing all day long that DeLay and all these Republicans are full of hypocrisy, as though that somehow justifies a woman's death. It's a silly way to pursue an argument. As I said Friday, this is not about conservative and liberal, but it's interesting to look at the two sides and how they come down on this. The left is trying to argue for this on the basis that Republicans are being hypocritical about it and it's irrelevant. And then to say that she was bulimic and she brought this on herself because she didn't have enough self-respect and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and when you also found out the husband had warned her he would abandon her if she gained any weight, I mean, for crying out loud, are we starting deciding that people who are bulimic deserve to die? I mean, the rationale that some people are coming up with continues to boggle the mind. By the way, we've had a magnitude 8.2 earthquake reported in Sumatra, Indonesia. And of course now the tsunami fears are no doubt heightened, as they naturally would be.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One more thing here from John Fund's piece today, the OpinionJournal.com entitled "Selective Restraint," and this is just to let you know that Janet Reno was also in defiance of a court order. Here are the two relevant paragraphs. "If a state court had been allowed to hear the custody case, INS officials would not have been able to testify as to what Mr. Gonzalez told them to support his claim because it would have been hearsay. He would have had to come to the U.S. to testify on his own [this is the father] subject to cross-examination. Even if the state court had granted him custody, it would have had to decide whether it was in the child's best interest to be returned to Cuba." That's if a state court had been allowed to hear the custody case. "That's what Judge Rosa Rodriguez of Florida Family Court, complying with the original INS ruling, tried to do when she ruled in early January 2000 that her court had jurisdiction over the boy and gave Elian's great-uncle legal authority to represent him. Her order contravened an INS ruling that only Elian's father could speak for the boy and that he should be immediately returned to Cuba. Attorney General Janet Reno than promptly declared that Judge Rodriguez's ruling had 'no force or effect.'" Simply said (paraphrasing), "What you've just ruled here judge has no force or effect because I'm ruling that you don't have jurisdiction." This was not Congress. This was not the elected representatives of the people interceding. This was the justice department and the attorney general. And she told a family court judge, you've got no standing here. You have no force or effect with your ruling. "At the same time, INS officials assured reporters that under no circumstances did they intend to seize Elian by force." Which is exactly what they did. So you have circumstances -- everything is not similar here. It's not down the line similar, but, you know, you've got the left in this country having a conniption fit over Congress getting involved, a couple Sunday nights, Monday mornings ago.
You've got the left in this country having a conniption fit over President Bush being involved by simply flying back to Washington to sign the legislation. You've got the left having conniption fits over those of us who are being critical of the tyrannical judiciary in this country, and yet here back in 2000 the justice department and Greg Craig respectively told a Florida family court you have no force or effect with your ruling and the 11th circuit was told by Greg Craig, you're wrong and so the INS just went in there and took the kid away under search warrant and spirited him back to Cuba and that was it, and there was no action purified against Reno nor Greg Craig for violating two different courts. Now, I'm not trying to remind everybody or refight the Elian Gonzales business. The left is out there shouting hypocrisy at the right. If they're going to shout hypocrisy I'm going to turn it around and let it bounce right off me and aim it back at them, because where was their disgust with the same types of things they think they're clearly disgusted with today, although the things they're disgusted with today pale in comparison to what Reno, the justice department, and Greg Craig did five years ago: Utter defiance of two different courts, and the veritable kidnapping via search warrant from a night court magistrate of Elian Gonzales and then sending him back to Cuba.
You know, these are two different stories obviously, but if you ask me the Gonzales story has the greater degree of thumbing one's nose at the courts, and basically saying to the court:"We don't like your ruling. Screw it. We're going to do what we want to do anyway. I'm the attorney general. What are you going to do to stop me?" Which leads us to the next story. This is from the American Spectator Online today, their Prowler column. The White House was 'troubled,' according to one source, about the reported actions -- or inactions, in this case -- of the Justice Department last week as Republicans in Congress made a last ditch attempt to rescue Terri Schiavo. 'You actually had Arlen Specter and his Judiciary Committee out there trying to save this woman's life, and then you have Alberto Gonzales and his crew over at Justice basically putting up roadblocks,' says a White House staffer. 'This was not a good way for Gonzales to start his tenure there.' Gonzales has been on the job at Justice for a little over two months now, and the congressional attempts to restore the feeding tube to Schiavo was the new AG's first high-profile foray into the politics that swirl around the Justice Department. By most accounts, Gonzales and his team fared poorly, at least from Republican viewpoints. 'Instead of trying to work with us, all we got were no's and roadblocks, with little guidance on what we could do and could not do,' says a House leadership staffer who spoke often with the Justice Department's Legislative Affairs office. 'They weren't being helpful, and they sure weren't doing the White House any favors.'..."
"To be fair to Gonzalez, Ashcroft's presence at Justice probably would not have made much difference. Ashcroft was excoriated by conservatives on his leaving office for what they said were his failures to press for tough stands against pornography, human trafficking and abortion rights..." I don't know that he got hit that hard by conservatives. You know what I think this is? And I'm just going to throw a stab in the dark at this, but I think this is what happens to our nominees who get creamed during confirmation hearings. I think they get scared. I think they get beaten up so much and they are accused of so much outrageous stuff. The stuff that Gonzales was accused of? Being an architect of torture at Abu Ghraib. Gonzales was accused of all of these inhumane activities. The left did everything they could to stop Gonzales from becoming attorney general, and had he acted -- I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was in his mind that shortly after his confirmation and relatively shortly after his confirmation hearings, he would take action like this, that the left would stand and act outraged and say, "See, we told you, this man's not qualified," and so forth. I also think the public polling on this is affecting a lot of people even though that public polling is bogus, by misstating Terri Schiavo's medical circumstances and conditions. Nevertheless, I gotta go.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So back during the Elian Gonzales story when Janet Reno basically told a family court judge in Florida, "Your ruling has no force or effect," and Greg Craig and the justice department told the 11th Circuit Court, "Your ruling is wrong. We're going to go in and get the kid." Well, they didn't say that. They said, "Your ruling..." Well, they may not have said it. "The ruling is wrong. INS, get a search warrant. Go in and get the kid, take him back to Cuba." During all of that where were all of the mainstream media types and the liberal members of Congress and these liberal law professors? Where were they talking about, "You can't do this to the courts! You can't overrule the courts like this! You can't do that." I'll tell you where they were: They were rooting for Reno! They were rooting for Reno. The left was rooting for Reno and rooting for Juan Miguel Gonzales and rooting for Clinton to send this kid back to Cuba, which is what they wanted, and of course when the courts were defied, when two courts were defied back then you didn't hear any complaints from the left about what all this meant, what the ramifications were. Because their side that they were rooting for had won and they weren't concerned about the effect on the judiciary. There were no concerns about future lawlessness and what this might lead to. Why, this might lead to anybody just deciding to say, "To hell with the court ruling! I'm just going to go ahead and do what I want to do. To hell with it. I'm the justice department. I'm the attorney general or I'm a lawyer close to Bill Clinton, the president, so I'm just going to do what I want to do."
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/da...tor.member.html
The bottom line:
1) The 11th Circuit turned down Reno's request to remove Elian before Janet acted.
2) The 11th Circuit approved of state court jurisdiction to resolve the custody dispute.
3) The 11th Cirucit agreed that Eilian had made a sufficient plea to remain in the US.
Note also the Michael Schiavo interview with Larry King where he said he did not know what Terri would have wanted. I will look for that transcript in due course.
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shawnmmcc
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Hello? Anybody listening? It is interesting, with all the various insta-doctors out there - none of the don't pull the plug crowd has addressed m post about oxygen starvation and the brain. 10 minutes. You don't recover. Period. Nada. Never. You're a vegetable, and aren't coming back. Source - The American Academy of Neurosciences. Somehow I doubt they qualify as biased.
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Rufus T. Firefly
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is one way of saying it, though I prefer "mensch"
Sep 2000
time: 07:28
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Haven't seen this posted yet. It doesn't excoriate DeLay as much as I would like, but then probably nothing could...:
quote:
Deathbed Conversion
The lesson of Tom DeLay's mortal hypocrisy.
By William Saletan
Posted Monday, March 28, 2005, at 11:23 AM PT
In 1988, Tom DeLay's 65-year-old father, Charles DeLay, suffered catastrophic brain damage and went into a coma. He had no hope of recovery but evidently reacted when his son entered the room. Although Charles DeLay had no living will, his family concluded that he would be better off dead and wouldn't want to go on living this way. Tom DeLay joined other family members in deciding to withhold dialysis. His father died.
That story, pieced together from interviews and medical and court records by Walter F. Roche Jr. and Sam Howe Verhovek of the Los Angeles Times, defies Tom DeLay's pronouncements 16 years later. In the Terri Schiavo case, DeLay condemns the reasoning he and his relatives followed when the tragedy was theirs. Which is more honorable: what DeLay says as a politician, or what he did as a son? And what does that tell us about the wisdom of families and politicians in matters of life and death?
Physically, Charles DeLay was in far worse shape than Terri Schiavo. He needed dialysis, not just nutrition. He was 65, not 41. His body, unlike hers, was failing. But mentally, his condition was similar. According to his sister-in-law, doctors told the family that Charles DeLay would "basically be a vegetable." A neighbor who had visited him in the hospital said he "did a bit of moaning and groaning, I guess, but you could see there was no way he was coming back." Tom DeLay's mother told the Times that her husband seemed unconscious except that "whenever Randy [his son] walked into the room, his heart, his pulse rate, would go up a little bit."
Friends and relatives considered Charles DeLay's quality of life and concluded he'd be better off dead. "He was all but gone," said the neighbor. "He would have been better off if he'd died right there and then." According to Charles' sister-in-law, his brother "prayed that, if [Charles] couldn't have quality of life, that God would take him—and that is exactly what [H]e did."
God may have taken Charles, but his family held the door open. They inferred, without written evidence, that Charles wouldn't have wanted to go on living in this condition. "Daddy did not want to be a vegetable," said Vi Skogen, who at the time was Charles' daughter-in-law. Tom DeLay's mother told the Times, "There was no point to even really talking about it. There was no way [Charles] wanted to live like that. Tom knew—we all knew—his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way."
That was then. This is now. At a press conference on March 18, Tom DeLay denied that quality of life could be valid grounds for withdrawing Schiavo's feeding tube. "It's not for any one of us to decide what her quality of life should be," he said. "It's not any one of us to decide whether she should live or die." Congress, DeLay explained, was intervening against Schiavo's husband "to protect her constitutional right to live."
In the absence of a living will, DeLay argued, Schiavo's spouse couldn't legally vouch for her wishes, as DeLay's mother had done—on less apparent basis—for DeLay's father. When a reporter noted that "Terri Schiavo's husband has said that she expressed a verbal desire that she not continue in this sort of state," DeLay replied, "The sanctity of life overshadows the sanctity of marriage. I don't know what transpired between Terri and her husband. All I know is Terri is alive. … And unless she had specifically written instructions in her hand and with her signature, I don't care what her husband says."
A day later, DeLay told reporters that Congress had to intervene rather than "take it from just a few people that have decided whether she lives or dies. For one person in one state court to make this decision is too heavy. That's why it does take all of us to think this through, think about the Constitution and its protection of life."
DeLay hasn't confined his condemnation to the principles on which his family acted. He has condemned the character of people who now apply or defend those principles. On March 18, he charged, "Senators Boxer, Wyden, and Levin have put Mrs. Schiavo's life at risk to prove a point—an unprecedented profile in cowardice." A day later, he said of Schiavo's husband, "I don't have a whole lot of respect for a man that has treated this woman in this way. … My question is: What kind of man is he?"
Why the difference between then and now? Maybe because DeLay saw his father as a human being. He speaks of Schiavo as something more—and less. "It's more than just Terri Schiavo," DeLay told the Family Research Council on March 18. "It is a critical issue for people in this position, and it is also a critical issue to fight the fight for life, whether it be euthanasia or abortion. And I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to elevate the visibility of what's going on in America."
This is what happens when you approach a tragedy as a politician rather than as a family member. You see quality of life as a slippery-slope abstraction, not as a reality affecting someone you love. You find it easy to impose a standard of documentation that would have forced your family to break the law. You second-guess a spouse in a way you would never second-guess your mother. You challenge people's competence and impugn their character. You perceive the afflicted person more as God's tool than as God's child.
I don't have a lot of respect for a man who treats a woman this way. But to dismiss him as a hypocrite would further politicize a case he has already politicized too much. My question is: What kind of man is he? My answer is: He's a better child than politician. So are we all. That's why families should make these decisions, and Congress should stay out.
William Saletan is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. |
Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2115879/
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29-03-2005 10:55
Attachment: 
, you support that, but not this? 
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