THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN

Seeking to void the nation's only formal "right-to-die" law, lame duck
Attorney General John Ashcroft asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday to
give federal agents the authority to punish Oregon doctors who help
dying patients end their lives.

The Bush administration's top legal officer said federal drug laws
trump the state's right to control the practice of medicine within its
borders. Mr. Ashcroft is appealing the rulings of two lower courts,
which held that Oregon has a right to regulate -- and to decide when
not to regulate -- its doctors.

The case is the second before the Supreme Court this year in which the
administration is challenging West Coast voters on matters of
individual liberty and personal privacy. The other matter involves
California's medical marijuana law.

In 1994 Oregon voters passed the United States' first and only
"right-to-die" measure. Known as the Death with Dignity Act, it allows
doctors to prescribe lethal medications to terminally ill patients who
wish to hasten their deaths. (Since 1997, only 171 people have used
medication to end their lives, the state has reported. Most of them
had cancer.)

The Supreme Court need look no further for guidance in these matters
than the words of Thomas Jefferson, who galvanized this nation and the
world when in July 1776 he advanced the then-radical doctrine that,
"All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness -- that to secure these rights,
government are instituted among men."

Mr. Jefferson was clarifying that the purpose of government is not to
take away the rights of the individual, private citizen to make his or
her own decisions about his own life and happiness, but precisely to
protect those freedoms.

For what good is "freedom," if we are only "free" to act in a manner
approved by our federal masters?

Mr. Ashcroft appears never to have grasped this simple idea, nor the
necessary companion doctrine that our central government is one of
sharply limited powers -- while all other matters of domestic
organization are intended to be left to the sovereign states.

Mr. Ashcroft's attempts to extend pain and suffering far from the
capital for no better reason than to prop up the spurious notion of
federal supremacy is wrong. The people of California and Oregon have
spoken.