ROBERTS'S ICE BREAKER

We have ourselves a new chief justice and his name is John Roberts. And one of the first cases John Roberts, in the capacity of Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, will hear is Gonzalez v. Oregon (October 5). That’s what I call an ice breaker.

Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act, which legalizes physician-assisted suicide with certain restrictions, was established with the approval of Measure 16 in November of 1994. And this approval was reiterated once again in 1997, when Measure 51, designed to eliminate Measure 16, was repealed.

Meaning – twice the good people of Oregon cast their vote for the law, not against it. And even those in Congress who tried to block its implementation failed as well.

Now, the case is up for Supreme Court review – courtesy of former US Attorney General John Ashcroft (yes, the same one who use to anoint himself whenever he was sworn into public office, with cooking oil if necessary). Ashcroft is, by all accounts, a religious conservative who tried unsuccessfully to get rid of Roe v. Wade while in office.

Perhaps he thought that the Death With Dignity Act was an easier target, given that it is recent, pioneering, controversial, and limited to Oregon alone. In any case, one fine day he challenged Oregon’s courageous, history-making initiative by claiming that assisted suicide is not a legitimate medical practice arising from a legitimate medical need; and that it entails improper use of medication – therefore illegal under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Talk about agenda…

Regardless of my feelings on the issue (by the way, I do support the law because it seems only logical to me that terminally ill people should have their choice on how and if to endure their own suffering), what is at stake here is the old clash between the states’ rights and authority and the power of federal government.

To be sure, the CSA was never intended to supersede the states as primary regulators of physicians; that regulation is to be the state’s prerogative. Also, the 1997 “Funding Act” determined that no federal funds could be used for assisted suicide, and Ashcroft, back then a senator and cosponsor of the Senate version of the bill, said –

[The bill] does not in any way forbid a State to legalize assisted suicide or even to provide its own funds for assisted suicide. It simply says Federal resources are not to be used to promote or conduct assisted suicides. After passage of this bill, States might choose to legalize or fund assisted suicide, but they would not be able to draw on Federal resources normally drawn upon in joint efforts between the State and the Federal Government for the provision of health services.

Does it get any clearer than that? Even without Ashcroft’s words, it is evident that the mere approval of the Funding Act means that the federal government recognized the states’ right to legalize assisted suicide on their own.

Can anyone explain to me how this case made it so far?