Apparently, Tom Delay's commitment to the Hippocratic Oath is just hypocritical. Link to LA Times story.
In my opinion, these end of life decisions are hard enough. We don't need the U.S. Congress and White House interfering.
Wasn't one of the biggest criticisms of the Clinton Healthcare plan, the fact that bureaucrats in D.C. would be involved in people's individual health care decisions? Now, the Republican-led Congress thinks they should be involved in end-of-life decisions?
I don't think so.
In my opinion, these end of life decisions are hard enough. We don't need the U.S. Congress and White House interfering.
Wasn't one of the biggest criticisms of the Clinton Healthcare plan, the fact that bureaucrats in D.C. would be involved in people's individual health care decisions? Now, the Republican-led Congress thinks they should be involved in end-of-life decisions?
I don't think so.
DeLay's Own Tragic Crossroads
by Walter F. Roche Jr. and Sam Howe Verhovek
CANYON LAKE, Texas — A family tragedy that unfolded in a Texas hospital during the fall of 1988 was a private ordeal — without judges, emergency sessions of Congress or the debate raging outside Terri Schiavo's Florida hospice.
The patient then was a 65-year-old drilling contractor, badly injured in a freak accident at his home. Among the family members keeping vigil at Brooke Army Medical Center was a grieving junior congressman — Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas).
More than 16 years ago, far from the political passions that have defined the Schiavo controversy, the DeLay family endured its own wrenching end-of-life crisis. The man in a coma, kept alive by intravenous lines and oxygen equipment, was DeLay's father, Charles Ray DeLay.
Then, freshly reelected to a third term in the House, the 41-year-old DeLay waited, all but helpless, for the verdict of doctors.
Today, as House Majority Leader, DeLay has teamed with his Senate counterpart, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), to champion political intervention in the Schiavo case. They pushed emergency legislation through Congress to shift the legal case from Florida state courts to the federal judiciary.
And DeLay is among the strongest advocates of keeping the woman, who doctors say has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, connected to her feeding tube. DeLay has denounced Schiavo's husband, as well as judges, for committing what he calls "an act of barbarism" in removing the tube.
In 1988, however, there was no such fiery rhetoric as the congressman quietly joined the sad family consensus to let his father die.
"There was no point to even really talking about it," Maxine DeLay, the congressman's 81-year-old widowed mother, recalled in an interview last week. "There was no way [Charles] wanted to live like that. Tom knew — we all knew — his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way." [...]
Comments