- ATLANTA (Bloomberg) - As
a lesson in how far Attorney General John Ashcroft will go beyond the law,
beyond bedrock conservative principles and beyond his own promises, there's
no better reading than a federal judge's decision this month in Oregon.
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- It sprung from Ashcroft's most recent attempt to eviscerate
an Oregon law that allows physicians to help dying patients hasten their
deaths under strictly limited circumstances. Ashcroft doesn't like this
law, nor do right-to-life groups or religious conservatives who have tried
to defeat it at every opportunity.
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- Unfortunately for them, the people of Oregon do like
this law. They've twice voted for it. Their state attorney general defends
it. Their governor supports it.
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- Tossing aside the principle of states' rights, Ashcroft
as a U.S. senator twice backed bills that would have enacted a federal
law to supercede this state law. Neither bill passed Congress.
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- Then Ashcroft abandoned another conservative principle:
that lawmakers, not regulators, should make the big policy decisions. He
wrote U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and urged her to distort federal
anti-drug law to stop drug-assisted suicides in Oregon. She declined.
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- Not Legitimate
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- So last November, Ashcroft did as attorney general what
Reno wouldn't. He invoked the federal Controlled Substances Act, a law
aimed at drug traffickers, and threatened to use it against physicians
who prescribe drugs to help patients end their lives.
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- Relying on a provision that lets physicians prescribe
controlled substances for ``legitimate medical purposes,'' Ashcroft declared
assisting suicide serves no such purpose. He said those who authorize lethal
drugs should lose their prescription-writing privileges and face possible
prosecution.
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- (Had it not been stopped, Ashcroft's directive would
have reverberated beyond Oregon, according to Kathryn Tucker, legal affairs
director for Compassion in Dying, a legal advocacy group for the terminally
ill. Any medical practitioner who, even with permission from patient and
family, prescribes or administers lethal doses of pain killers to alleviate
suffering in the patient's final hours would fear federal prosecution,
too.
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- Ashcroft had no business whatsoever doing what he did,
Senior U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones ruled April 17.
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- `Unprecedented and Extraordinary'
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- ``To allow the attorney general -- an appointed executive
whose tenure depends entirely on whatever administration occupies the White
House -- to determine the legitimacy of a particular medical practice without
a specific congressional grant of such authority would be unprecedented
and extraordinary,'' Jones wrote.
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- The Justice Department was ``never authorized to establish
a national medical practice or act as a national medical board,'' he said.
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- The states, not the federal government, regulate the
practice of medicine. The federal drug control law merely requires physicians
and pharmacists to register with the Drug Enforcement Administration to
prescribe and dispense drugs.
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- That law is aimed at controlling drug trafficking, not
suicide, Jones wrote, and the Justice Department's attempts to say otherwise
were ``misleading'' and strained credulity.
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- Promises, Promises
-
- What's more, Ashcroft ``completely ignored'' his promise
to Oregon's attorney general to discuss Oregon's Death with Dignity Act
before moving to nullify it, Jones said.
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- Ashcroft ``really got nailed,'' says Richard Holmes,
an Oregon Republican with terminal cancer. Holmes is among the dying Oregonians
who went to court with the state of Oregon to try to save the Death with
Dignity Act.
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- As for the judge, perhaps you suspect such a harsh opinion
could have only come from a liberal Clinton appointee. In fact, Jones is
a Republican named to the federal bench in 1990 by President George H.W.
Bush.
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- Nor does Jones sound comfortable with assisted suicide.
His decision acknowledges the ``tremendous disagreement among highly respected
medical practitioners'' as to whether it's a legitimate medical practice.
He says opponents of assisted suicide may be ``fully justified, morally,
ethically, religiously or otherwise.''
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- Manipulation
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- Even if they are, he said, that would not justify allowing
``a federal statute to be manipulated from its true meaning to satisfy
even a worthy goal.''
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- Whether Ashcroft or Jones likes it or not, the Oregon
voters have decided the issue for themselves, he wrote.
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- Jones sounds like the sort of decision maker that Ashcroft
pledged to be as attorney general.
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- ``I understand that being attorney general means enforcing
the laws as they are written, not enforcing my personal preferences,''
Ashcroft assured nervous Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee during
his confirmation hearings last year.
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- Ashcroft swore he'd even uphold laws allowing abortions,
despite his longtime advocacy in right-to-life causes.
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- Not everyone was convinced. ``When you have been such
a zealous and impassioned advocate for so long, how do you just turn it
off,'' Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, asked during Ashcroft's
confirmation hearing.
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- ``This,'' Schumer added, ``may be an impossible task.''
-
- And so it is.
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- ©2002 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Ann Woolner
is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.
http://bloomberg.com/feature/feature1019826782.html
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