FEDERAL ARROGANCE

THE CANDOR of federal District Judge Robert Jones had to have embarrassed
Attorney General John Ashcroft this week, when the judge forcefully
rejected the Justice Department's attempt to block Oregon's assisted
suicide law.

In his decision, Judge Jones wrote the truth: that the attorney general had
overstepped his bounds. Judge Jones said he could find no statute showing
Congress had "delegated to federal prosecutors the authority to define what
constitutes legitimate medical practices."

Last fall, Mr. Ashcroft directed the Drug Enforcement Administration to
revoke the prescription-writing privileges of Oregon doctors who prescribed
drugs for assisted suicides, even though Oregon's law allows it.

This was, as Judge Jones wrote, nothing but an attempt by opponents of
assisted suicide "to get through the administrative door what they could
not get through the congressional door."

There were telling ironies in this decision. First, Judge Jones is no
liberal. He was appointed by the first President George Bush.

And, second, conservative Republicans generally favor state authority over
federal. This time, Mr. Ashcroft was trying to override the judgment of
Oregon voters who twice approved the Death With Dignity Act. Clearly, the
desire to impose a particular morality was blinding.

Consider the Justice Department's response to Judge Jones' decision: "A
just and caring society should do its best to assist in coping with the
problems that afflict the terminally ill," an assistant attorney general
said. "It should not abandon or assist in killing them."

But there could be, and are, a variety of moral interpretations of words
like "just and caring," "assist" and "abandon." Some patients, for example,
might feel abandoned and uncared for when, in the final throes of
excruciating illness, they're hooked up to tubes, drugged, and left to die
"naturally," as Mr. Ashcroft prefers.

Assisted suicide is a difficult subject, one that doctors, individuals and
courts have wrestled with for years. Judge Jones was correct: Mr. Ashcroft
doesn't have the right or power to decide.