OREGON JUDGE NOT INTIMIDATED BY ASHCROFT

This is a fan letter to a man I've never met; a man with more courage than
all the members of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee combined:
the Hon. Robert Jones, a federal district court judge in Oregon.

Last month Judge Jones did what no invertebrate politician in this country
has had the intestinal fortitude to do since September 11, 2001. He stood
up to Attorney General John Ashcroft and told him, in effect, to keep his
blue nose out of Oregon's affairs.

Optimist that I am, I thought the Judiciary Committee and its chairman,
Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., would deliver the same message when Ashcroft came
before them last fall, shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon: Keep your hands off the Constitution. But when Ashcroft
let them know that any criticism of him or his actions would be tantamount
to helping terrorism, the senators wilted like so many frost-bitten tomato
plants.

Perhaps emboldened by his conquest of the spineless solons, Ashcroft, the
compassionate conservative's sop to Bible Belt reactionary religionists,
moved on to other matters. He declared war on medicinal marijuana users in
California and then turned his guns on Oregon's assisted suicide law.

Twice -- once in 1994 and again in 1997 -- voters in Oregon approved a law
that allows physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill persons with less
than six months to live.

Can't have that, God's self-appointed legal interpreter decided, and issued
an order warning physicians that they would be stripped of their licenses
to prescribe federally controlled substances -- in effect their right to
practice medicine -- if they did what the state's law allows them to do.

At which point Judge Jones stepped in. He issued a temporary injunction
against Ashcroft's order, and on April 17 ruled further that Ashcroft had
overstepped his authority in trying to abrogate Oregon's law. Oregon
voters, Jones noted in his ruling, had twice approved the law and in his
words "have chosen to resolve the moral, legal and ethical debate over
physician-assisted suicide for themselves." In other words: Ashcroft, butt out.

There has been no personal response from Ashcroft, who perhaps is waiting
for word from on high. But one of his assistance issued a statement full of
the usual platitudes about physicians' obligation to preserve health, heal
disease and relieve pain.

All noble objectives, to be sure, but what about when there is no health
left to preserve, a disease beyond healing, and finally no relief for the
pain? Is it a physicians's duty to prolong suffering, when a patient has
had more than enough?

If you have ever watched someone you love die of a painful, wasting
disease, pleading for the suffering to be over, then you know, or should
know, how insensitive -- despicable even -- Ashcroft's actions were.

In fairness to Ashcroft, I suppose I should point out that he is not
entirely opposed to ending people's lives. It's just that he prefers the
killing to be on his terms.

Columnist Richard Cohen, writing recently in The Washington Post, noted
that since assuming office, Ashcroft has overruled local U. S. attorneys 12
times in capital cases, demanding that they ask for death penalty verdicts.
Like the compassionate conservative himself, Ashcroft apparently has never
met a death sentence he didn't like.

Cohen described Ashcroft as having "a religious faith in capital
punishment," an appropriate phrasing in that Ashcroft apparently does think
he is doing God's work. Scores of death sentences overturned by DNA
evidence appear to influence him not at all.

Vengeance is mine, saith St. John Ashcroft, and that's that.