by Brooks A. Mick, M.D.

After all my years of defending talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, I feel deserted and betrayed. I thought they took pains to be factual. I thought they were true conservatives. To be sure, nobody’s perfect, and I noted an occasional minimal factual error, usually corrected when it was pointed out. But I had not heretofore seen such an egregious abandonment of basic conservative principles and such despicable fabrication of facts.

Example 1) Rush Limbaugh has maintained for the past few days that Congress was given, by the Constitution, sufficient power over the courts to allow them to reverse rulings or to pass the law which was designed specifically to “save” Terri Schiavo. In particular, he mentioned Article 3. Now I had read Article 3 in the past and didn’t recall it quite that way, but I gave him the benefit of a doubt and read it again.

Article 3, Section 1 establishes the Supreme Court and gives the authority ti congress to “ordain and establish” lower courts, but it says nothing about power to reverse court decisions.

Article 3, Section 3 deals with treason, which this case is obviously not. No help there.

Article 3, Section 2 grants a lot of powers in a lot of cases to the courts, but does say that Congress shall have the ability to make some exceptions regarding the specific types of cases already given to the courts by Section 2, Clause 1.

BUT if one skims elsewhere through the Constitution, one notes that Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 states plainly that no ex post facto laws may be written by Congress.

Now what is an ex post facto law? It is a law written after an action has been committed. I would submit that in this case the laws in existence at the time of the state court decisions were followed correctly and that the prohibition against ex post facto laws would prohibit Congress from then creating a law to abrogate those rulings and produce an outcome that Congress desired. Thus, it is clear that though Section 2 gives Congress the power to make some exceptions and guidelines for courts, it explicitly prohibits
Congress from taking a case and a decision it disagrees with and then passing a law to attempt to produce a different outcome.

Example 2) Sean Hannity has fallen into the Rathergate trap. He has blindly, uncritically accepted and trumpeted statements which agree with his point of view without stopping to consider the glaring evidence that these stories are being fabricated by the Terri advocates in their zeal to produce the court outcome they desire. Every time there is an adverse court decision, the statements by family and “witnesses” such as nurses escalates. Not long ago they were saying she followed a balloon and made grunting or moaning sounds. Then there were witnesses who said she said “Mommy.” Then she said Mommy” and, most suspiciously, they suddenly claimed she said “pain!” This was specifically designed, it is clear, to fit with their claims of tube feeding withdrawal as a “horrible and painful” death.

The former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, whom I previously admired for supporting the principle that a monument t the Ten Commandments did not constitute a federal establishment of religion but who now reveals himself to be a fanatic legal bomb-thrower, comes on the Hannity show and says with angry blitheness, if such is possible, that the President can simply ignore the rulings of any court he wishes to ignore. I submit that this is a position allowing dictatorship. President Bush and Governor Bush will now be demagogued and demonized by the anti-abortion fanatics if they don’t act in a totalitarian fashion here. One wonders if the whole plot is a Clinton scheme to destroy support for Republicans among the Christian wing of the Republican Party.

And one only has to note that the despicable and evil Randall Terry is the ringleader of these people to get a good idea of what is transpiring. The anti-abortion fanatics have hijacked Terri Schiavo and are using their case to further damage personal freedom and personal responsibility and to establish the power of government to meddle in personal issues.

Hannity gets absolutely hostile about Judge Greer’s refusal to allow Congress to subpoena Terri Schiavo as a witness, never mind the blatant idiocy of subpoenaing a witness who can’t testify!

Example 3) Ann Coulter, usually correct and funny and interesting, says that it would be OK for the executive branch to ignore the judicial and call out the military to impose, in effect, martial law, because Governor Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling. And of course, President Eisenhower called out the military to enforce the Supreme Court ruling. I submit these aren’t equivalent.uses of force. The analogy fits, however, if one notes that Eisenhower was enforcing the Supreme Court ruling and Bush is refusing to declare martial law to abrogate a Supreme Court ruling. And one should not in effect laud the use of the military to prevent civil rights as Faubus did. Which may be just a result of Ann’s being off her feed. She just wasn’t as sharp and logical and funny in the piece cited.

Right-wing talk radio now reminds me of nothing more than the Democratic response following the Florida 2000 election. The election did not come out the way they wanted, so Al Gore threw a political tantrum and began demonizing the opposition, Democrats began filing lawsuits, and they began pressuring for legislation from the bench. They championed blatantly unconstitutional procedures, and they simply refused to accept the clear outcome. Judge Greer is now the Republican’s Katharine Harris, demonized and demagogued though he clearly and narrowly followed the law, eschewing judicial activism and avoiding legislating from the bench.

It seems clear, looking back, that the Al Gore political tantrum did the Democrats no good. I hope that the current right-wing tantrum does not harm the conservative positions in the future, conservative positions of federalism, states’ rights, personal responsibility and freedom, and limited government. All of these principles have been abandoned by the so-called conservatives in talk radio now.