Federalism vs. life

Talk about mixed emotions: What stand is a columnist like me, who’s both pro-life and for states’ rights, supposed to take on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week in Gonzales v. Oregon?

That’s the case in which the justices, 6-3, found Attorney General John Ashcroft went too far when he decided the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 gave him authority to effectively overrule Oregon’s assisted-suicide law, by ruling doctors there couldn’t use certain drugs for that purpose.

On the one hand, which is how opinionators always begin when we’re tempted to skirt a hard question, I’m all for federalism. (It used to be called States’ Rights before the term lost its credibility after it was regularly used as a cover to violate the constitutional rights of others.) But the underlying principle remains valid: Why not let different states adopt different approaches to divisive issues, and see how they work out?

That way, states could make their own decisions, and great national schisms over volatile issues — like abortion, for example — could be avoided. Clever, those Founding Fathers.

Federalism offers another advantage besides a civil accommodation on disruptive social issues: The states, as the Venerable Louis Brandeis famously said, are laboratories of democracy. Let them experiment.

Ah, but on the other hand, suppose one of those laboratories turns out to be Dr. Frankenstein’s, and it’s experimenting with a moral monstrosity? Live and let live is one thing, but what about kill and let be killed? As in Oregon’s assisted-suicide law.

For all the high-minded sound of it, federalism, like the slogan of States’ Rights before it, could wind up covering something very low. Which is what worries groups like Not Dead Yet that represent Americans with disabilities. Is euthanasia to be the next great Choice, as in Freedom of?

Oregon is only one state, we are assured. Yeah, and at first legalized abortion wasn’t going to be any big deal, either. Lest we forget — and it’s easy to — Roe v. Wade was also to be modest in its reach when handed down Jan. 22, 1973.

No less an authority than the author of Roe v. Wade, Justice Harry Blackmun himself, confided in a private memo that the court was not creating “an absolute right to abortion.” His naive interpretation of what he and his colleagues had wrought was echoed publicly by Chief Justice Warren Burger: “Plainly, the court today rejects any claim that the Constitution requires abortion on demand.”

Forgive them, Father, for they knew not what they had done. In the decades to come, abortion would become the most divisive, corrosive and sustained of national issues.

It’s not federalism that is to blame for this country’s great political, social and moral divide over abortion. We have come this far down the slippery slope precisely because the Burger Court declined to leave the issue to the states. It nationalized the abortion issue, and the whole, rancorous dispute over abortion with it. Rather than resolve the issue once and for all, the court succeeded only in inflaming it.

The continuing furor over Roe v. Wade is not a product of federalism but an example of what can happen when that guiding principle is abandoned. Instead of being allowed to act as safety valves for public discontent, those 50 state laboratories of democracy were bypassed.

All of which is why Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion for the majority last week in Gonzales v. Oregon comes across as eminently sensible — and calming.

To have allowed the U.S. attorney general to ban assisted suicide everywhere in the country would only have agitated the issue. Particularly if that decision rested on a law — the Controlled Substances Act — mainly intended to control use of illegal “recreational” drugs like marijuana, not prevent suicide. Surely death is not yet a recreational activity in this country.

Once again, Justice Kennedy has found in the plain sense of the law and in the ordinary meaning of words a safe path through an emotional minefield.

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