No, I'm not getting into this one. Not the meat and potatoes part, anyway. I did want to address two things that happened recently that are getting a fair share of hoopla and generating lots of righteous indignation.

Congress passed a law for one person.

Yes, they did. They do it all of the time. This is part of the normal course of business for our lawmakers. Although I find the practice reprehensible it is neither unusual nor (as clarified by the Supremes) unconstitutional. It is normally done to grant boons or give away money. It has been used to allow immigrant families to stay in the USA. It is used regularly to bail out industries. Need to give a couple billion in tax dollars to the airline industry? Just write a law. Easy pleasy mac and cheesy.

What these personalized laws cannot be used for is to target and harm individuals. I think that this particular law will fail the test because no matter who is right in the Shiavo case this law is specifically targeting and interfering with them. I don't think this law will pass constitutional muster.

As Ilyka pointed out so very well, stop barking at Congress for doing their job.

I've just got to get this off my chest right now: One bit of idiocy that needs to die is the ranting and raving about what an abuse of government power it is that Congress got involved**. Let's at least be clear about why Congress got involved: It's because people have been bothering the living daylights out of them. It's called representative government.

Links and fancy formatting over at Ilyka's. Go read, I'll wait for you.

The federal judge in Tampa did not follow the law - he didn't order Shiavo's feeding tube replaced.

Apples and oranges. The law isn't about Terry's feeding tube, it's about the overall case being heard in federal court.

The judge would have been breaking the law if he had ordered the tube replaced, based on the information provided to him in court. At the least he would have been trampling all over proper jurisprudence. In order to find immediately for Shiavo's parents (the requirement to replace the tube) their lawyers had to show they had an expectation of winning the federal court case. They couldn't show that they even had a minuscule case according to law. No precedents, no arguments, nothing. They have been working on this for years, there are 30,000 pages of court documents already filed, they have ostensibly been preparing for this exact case and they still didn't have squat ready for this court. Their argument boiled down to "We didn't prepare anything but you need to decide in our favor because we're right".

Don't blame the judge for following the precepts of law, blame the Shindler family's crappy lawyers.

That's it for today. Maybe tomorrow I'll do the meat and potatoes post. Then again, maybe not - I enjoy having readers.