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Supreme Court Stops Government From Blocking Oregon's Assisted Suicide Law

January 17, 2006

The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the White House's plan to punish doctors who assist terminally ill patients to commit suicide in Oregon. In a 6-3 narrow ruling, the Court ruled that former Attorney General John Ashcroft actede without legal authority when he tried to overrule Oregon's Death With Dignity Act.

With the new chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr., in dissent in the most high-profile case since he joined the court, the decision lifted a major barrier to state initiatives like the one in Oregon, which has the only assisted-suicide law in the country.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's majority opinion did not say that Congress could not act to block such laws, only that it had not given Mr. Ashcroft the "extraordinary authority" that he claimed when he threatened Oregon doctors who followed the state law with losing their federal prescription-writing privileges.

While the court's decision was based on standard principles of administrative law, and not on the Constitution, it was clearly influenced by the majority's view that the regulation of medical practice belonged, as a general matter, to the states. Mr. Ashcroft acted contrary to "the background principles of our federal system," Justice Kennedy said in his 28-page opinion

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Oregon voters approved the Death With Dignity Act in 1994 and affirmed it 1997. The law says that doctors who follow specific procedures may prescribe lethal doses of federally regulated medications to help their mentally competent, terminally ill patients end their lives. Through 2004, 325 people had obtained the lethal prescriptions, and 208 had used them

The ruling gives us a taste of what's to come on the Supreme Court. Sanda Day O'Connor wrote the majority opinion. Scalia, Roberts and Thomas dissented. The three most conservative members of the court -- who are always lecturing us about states' rights -- sided against the voters of Oregon (who approved the law three times) and sided with the federal government.

This hypocritical threesome side with states' rights when it suits them (such as when they are restricting women's right to choose) and then side against the states when it appears that the only way to trample on poeple's civil rights is to side with the federal government.

You can be sure that when Justice Alito takes over for O'Connor, he'll vote in lockstep with the three on these kinds of issues. And that is a very scary prospect.

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