Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Bork: Congress' Involvement in Schiavo Case Not Unique -- 03/21/2005

The late hours and mad rush and publicity of what the House and Senate did on behalf of Terri Schiavo might have been unusual, but otherwise they do this sort of thing quite often.

...Robert Bork, a Reagan administration nominee whom the U.S. Senate refused to confirm, called the federal legislation signed by President Bush early Monday morning something that "happens with some regularity."

"[The new law has] given jurisdiction to a federal court to hear, in effect an attack upon a state court outcome, but we do that all the time," said Bork, who authored the 2003 book "Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges" and is currently a distinguished fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute....
In the same article:

...Conservative legal scholar Mark R. Levin said Democratic liberals in Congress are upset because they are not in the position to affect what happens in the courts. "What really offends the Left is Congress asserting its constitutional power over a court, and not in service to the liberal agenda," Levin wrote in a posting on National Review Online on Monday.

Levin, president of the Landmark Legal Foundation, also authored "Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America."

"The right to live, or more specifically, the right not to be killed, is a fundamental right. And it's a right recognized in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence," Levin wrote.

"Article III specifically empowers Congress to determine the jurisdiction of the federal courts, which is all it did [Monday]. It authorized a federal court to determine whether Terri Schiavo's due process rights and the right not be subject to cruel and unusual punishment were properly protected by a state court," Levin added...
The article counters some of the statements being made by people who opposed the bill.

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