You'll stay, you'll suffer and you'll like it

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 today against the Justice Department's challenge to the state of Oregon's assisted suicide law, deeming its law to allow the practice, passed by two voter referendums, constitutional.

Bush's favorite Justice of all Justices, Antonin Scalia, dissented, saying the court's ruling ''is perhaps driven by a feeling that the subject of assisted suicide is none of the federal government's business.''

Or, perhaps it's driven by–get ready for this one, boys, because it might just blow your effing minds... the law. *whoa*

Precedent has established that it's up to states to decide the matter. Just like how if the Justice Department had been ruled in the right, precedent would practically bind other states from adopting similar laws and open any existing ones to being struck down.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that the terminally ill could refuse medical care that would otherwise keep them alive. This current case itself was a challenge to a 1997 ruling in which the justices opined there was no American "right to die" under the Constitution–meaning state bans on assisted suicide were therefore constitutional.

The flip side, affirmed in today's opinion, is that states that choose not to ban assisted suicide are also acting constitutionally, because the Constitution doesn't place the issue under federal jurisdiction.

I don't even have to wait to see Elizabeth Vargas smile her phony local news smile and say "thanks so much" to some commentator for his or her "balanced perspective" to hear it already: that all this ruling will do is provide yet another, state-sponsored means of fostering a culture of disrespect for life; that doctors and family members and finances will pressure the terminally ill into ending their lives; even that people who could have been helped will take the easy, cheap, whatever way out at the first mention of something "terminal."

Oregon's law doesn't allow someone to walk into a hospital and ask for a lethal shot of morphine. Patients have to be ruled incurable by at least two different doctors (specifically, two have to go on record with opinions that the patient has no more than six months to live), and they must be deemed mentally competent to make the decision to end their lives.

Besides, otherwise healthy people don't need any help killing themselves in this country. Tens of thousands do so every year–disturbingly close to twice the number who are killed each year by other people in homicides. But don't tell that to our dear Johnny Boy...

The ruling was a reprimand to former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who in 2001 said that doctor-assisted suicide is not a ''legitimate medical purpose'' and that Oregon physicians would be punished for helping people die under the law.

[In his opinion issued today, Justice] Kennedy said the ''authority claimed by the attorney general is both beyond his expertise and incongruous with the statutory purposes and design.''

Poor Johnny just can't catch a break lately. The case was brought in his stead by Attorney General Roberto Gonzales representing the Justice Department.

And hey, whadya know–who lines up in support of the Bush administration against Oregon's law but the Executive Branch-pawn trifecta of Justices Scalia, Thomas and our new pal Chief Justice Roberts, in his very first dissent to boot.

One would think the Bush administration would be all over this one in support of the Oregon law–they already want us to own our own health care and own our own retirements. Why can't we own our own mortality? It's win-win: those in power get fewer sick people, old people, poor people and other unproductive sloths dragging the great capitalistic machine down; the rest of us don't have to suffer under their "compassionate conservativism" any longer than we have to.

And it would be the perfect opportunity for moralizing conservatives to open up "sanctity of life flourishing facilities" or whatever euphemism they'd come up with for places good, righteous Americans can do to die the slow, wasting, moral way. Jeb Bush may not have missed his chance with the Terri Schiavo debacle to open up "Cussin' Jeb's Vegetable Patch" after all.

And Dubya's Crawford ranch could take on a whole new purpose. Maybe they could even open that up in lieu of the structural joke that will be the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Somehow rows of righteous, pro-life, brain dead, guaranteed Republican votes seems more fitting–and it would be just as quiet and just as whirling with intellectual zephyrs.

Regardless, it's now up to individual states to decide whether to adopt assisted suicide laws - it will be interesting to see if they start coming down on this issue, and how the responses will transpose onto the fabled red-and-blue map of the "culture war." And I don't know if this could become an election issue or a "moral issue" or what-have-you - if anything, it would probably just be taken over by the anti-abortion militants.

Though it is interesting how this broke the same day as California's execution of a blind, deaf, decrepit 76-year-old convict is sparking chatter over how, for some reason, people are having ethical troubles with executing members of an aging death row prison population–troubles they just don't have for younger, healthier ones.

Apparently the party of private ownership and private interests seems to want no one but the government deciding who gets a lethal injection.