Drive-by legislating

July 19, 2006

For a slow-moving bureaucracy, [tag]Republicans[/tag] in Washington sure can move quickly when they want to.

The Republican leadership is aware of the conflict between the short and long-term interests of the party and is doing what it can to diminish the cost. On [tag]stem cells[/tag], for example, the tactic is to get the battle over with as soon as possible. The GOP leadership chose the gap between the July 4th and August recesses as a low-visibility moment for the vote and compressed the time the voting would take. [tag]Bush[/tag]’s [tag]veto[/tag], and the expected House failure to override it, will come within days and will soon have been replaced by other issues. “It’ll all be over in 72 hours,” says one top GOP aide, “It’ll be like a summer storm.”

The same party that scheduled four full days of Senate debate on a constitutional amendment on flag burning is acting with remarkable efficiency this week. Roll Call’s Erin Billings described the process quite well: “Senate debates bill; Senate passes bill; House enrolls bill; [tag]President[/tag] Bush issues his first-ever presidential veto. All within three days.”

It’s almost as if Republicans are counting on voters forgetting all about this as the election season moves forward. It’ll be up to Dems to make sure they don’t.

And speaking of stem-cell [tag]research[/tag], the [tag]White House[/tag]’s rationalization for Bush’s pending veto is getting less coherent as time goes on.

From yesterday’s briefing:

Q: The legislation is going to be — that deals with thousands and thousands of embryos that will be thrown out, destroyed.

Snow: That is a [tag]tragedy[/tag], but the President is not going to get on the slippery slope of taking something that is living and making it dead for the purpose of research.

I desperately want Snow to explain this approach in more detail. It’s a “tragedy” that excess embryos from IVF procedures are discarded? There’s a very simple remedy: the White House can prevent this “tragedy” by asking Congress to outlaw IVF treatment altogether. Instead, Bush praises IVF as pro-family science.

I think this is one of the reasons this issue bothers me so much — it’s not only because the far-right position undermines medical research and scientific advancement; it’s also because the position is so terribly incoherent. As Michael Kinsley recently explained:

If you believe that embryos a few days after conception have the same human rights as you or me, killing innocent embryos is obviously intolerable. But do opponents of stem cell research really believe that? Stem cell research tests that belief, and sharpens the basic right-to-life question, in a way abortion never has.

Here’s why. Stem cells used in medical research generally come from fertility clinics, which produce more embryos than they can use. This isn’t an accident — it is essential to their mission of helping people have babies. Often these are “test tube babies”: the product of an egg fertilized in the lab and then implanted in a womb to develop until birth. Controversy about test-tube babies has all but disappeared. Vague science-fiction alarms have been crushed by the practical evidence, and potential political backlash, of grateful, happy parents.

In any particular case, fertility clinics try to produce more embryos than they intend to implant. Then — like the Yale admissions office (only more accurately) — they pick and choose among the candidates, looking for qualities that make for a better human being. If you don’t get into Yale, you have the choice of attending a different college. If the fertility clinic rejects you, you get flushed away — or maybe frozen until the day you can be discarded without controversy.

And fate isn’t much kinder to the embryos that make this first cut. Usually several of them are implanted in the hope that one will survive. Or, to put it another way, in the hope that all but one will not survive. And fertility doctors do their ruthless best to make these hopes come true.

In short, if embryos are human beings with full human rights, fertility clinics are death camps — with a side order of cold-blooded eugenics. No one who truly believes in the humanity of embryos could possibly think otherwise.

But they do think otherwise, and make no effort to reconcile the contradiction. As Kinsley concluded, “Moral sincerity is not impressive if it depends on willful ignorance and indifference to logic.”

Republican’ts are scared of the future, they are in charge and they are going to outlaw (funding) stem cell research.

It’s the best they can do. And it’s not very much, when you think about it. There are billions being spent on stem cell research. Maybe we should be glad the Republican’ts aren’t funding research. Their ingrained incompetence would mean that we’d be declaring successes like a South Korean Scientist 😉

After all, look how overblown were Boy George II’s claims for his sixty pre-August 2001 stem cell lines.

  • Upwards of fifty percent of all “natural” conceptions spontaneously abort, i.e., die. This happens, e.g., because of genetically defective sperm or ova, or errors in fertilization and early cell division. Since spontaneous abortion occurs usually during the first menses, the would-be mother rarely notices the loss. Since we — or at least scientists — know this beforehand, it’s clearly a case of intentionally murdering innocent lives, no? The only moral response, given these facts, is to outlaw all conception.

  • President Bush’s position isn’t “moral,” it’s “religious.” Religions live with these kinds of obvious contradictions all the time: How many children have had sincere queries about seemingly paradoxical religious exhortations dismissed by kindly old ladies with a breezy, “Well, it’s just different.”

    That’s why religion is a lousy basis for laws and governance. But it makes for great politics. All those nice little old ladies–they won’t ask if you don’t tell.

  • I don’t want to say “I told you so” but – oh, who am I kidding, I love saying “I told you so”: http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/7899.html#comment-44321

    It looks like I was right about Repubs dealing with this issue by shelving it ASAP, though wrong about Congress’s ability to override the veto.

    I wonder if Democrats have finally learned that their issues don’t just land on CNN – that they have to make a huge stink about something to get the media and the voters, to notice. If they want to make gains in November, now’s the time to make a stink about stem-cell research.

  • We are not putting all the important issues in the proper context of an election year. The speed with which the Republiskunk controlled Congrass rushed the Stem Cell Bill to Shrub for his veto while at the opposite end of the spectrum flag burning, gay marriage and illegal immigration aren’t allowed to die are all planned. The latter issues are intended to be cited as instances of Dems blocking bills that are “important” to conservatives for the run-up to the election. The preplanned veto of the Stem Cell Bill allowed the Shrub to veto a bill to appease those that criticized that he never voetoed anything. At the same time, a predetermined number of Republiskunks were allowed to vote against Shrub’s point of view on the Stem Cell Bill to make them more palatable to their district or state before the elections. At the risk of sounding like someone spouting conspiracy theories, I , sincerely believe that the violence in the Middle East is being ramped up in an effort to draw Iran in. If you have any doubts, read stories, op-eds and comments on the Jerusalem Post. They have an entire section highlighted in red “Iranian Threat”. There is no Lebanese Threat, Palestinian Threat or Syrian Threat section and there are no other sections highlighted in red. I’m sure someone will call me anti-semitic for pointing this out, but now is the last chance for Israel to exercise it’s US arm (The Shrub White House) to attack Iran before Shrub is collared, leashed and maybe neutered in the Fall elections by Dem oversight.

  • Mr. Snow sounds completely consistent with the philosophy of the administration.
    It is OK to destroy frozen embryos by discarding them if the reason is financial (ie the high cost of long term storage of all the “extras”).
    It is not OK to destroy frozen embryos for research if the reason is scientific.
    Does anyone really see a contradiction here with their other policies?

  • If a fertility clinic was on fire and you could save a 6 year old girl or a canister containing 50 embryos, which would you choose ?
    Then tell me they are are equally life.
    Knowing Bush… He would leave the little girl just to make a point.
    This is something I read, but I can not remember the source.

  • I cannot share, or even fathom, their conviction that a microscopic dot — as oblivious as a rock, more primitive than a worm — has the same human rights as anyone reading this article.

    Hear, hear, Michael Kinsey. That is not said often enough.

    Human embryos are unquestionably not people and should not be accorded the same rights as people. Where should they fit in the ethical pecking order of things that are not people?

    Consider a fish, for example. It has a beating heart and a functioning brain, just like a person. People are considered dead if their heart stops beating or their brain stops functioning. Of course, an embryo has neither a heart nor a brain. So how could destroying a human embryo be considered less ethical than killing a fish?

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