Cato Daily Dispatch for October 5, 2005
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Right to DieBush's War on Flu
Mr. Big Government
Right to Die
"The John Roberts Court will hear its first high-profile arguments today, when the justices take up a case involving doctor-assisted suicide. Oregon law allows terminally ill people to take lethal drugs to end their lives. But the Bush administration has tried to override this law by threatening to prosecute doctors involved in such cases. The Supreme Court should make it clear that Oregon can allow doctor-assisted suicide," The New York Times reports.
In Cato's friend of the court brief, co-author Mark Moller, a Cato senior fellow in constitutional studies, argues that the federal government must respect the special role of states as laboratories of experiment in our constitutional framework. "A system that favors state over federal regulation," notes Moller, "brings to social policy the same benefits that competition brings to economic policy -- by increasing options that better balance competing interests." Oregon's experiment with assisted dying, the brief continues, is a perfect example of the benefits of this system: Left unmolested by distant federal bureaucrats in Washington, Oregon "provides, at little cost to anyone, a wealth of information" about an untried approach to end-of-life decisions that has been "suppressed and silenced elsewhere."
Moller argues that the case highlights conservatives' increasingly tepid allegiance to federalism: "Once, conservative jurists defended the benefits of local decision-making in our constitutional system. Now just as yesterday's liberals refused to let states go their way on controversial issues, many Washington conservatives are all too eager to veto states that don't march in step to the latest Republican social policy. That's fair-weather federalism at its worst. And it's a betrayal of basic constitutional principle."
Bush's War on Flu
"An avian flu pandemic could be 'a catastrophe' so serious that troops might be needed to cordon off whole sections of the United States, President George W. Bush warned yesterday," according to The Globe and Mail.
The article continues: "'I am concerned about what an avian-flu outbreak could mean for the United States and the world,' Mr. Bush said at his first news conference in four months. After coming under fire for failing to deal effectively with hurricane Katrina's devastating blow to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the President seemed determined to project a newfound readiness to cope with natural and man-made threats.
In "Domestic Militarization: A Disaster in the Making," Gene Healy, senior editor at the Cato Institute, argues that there are very good reasons to resist any push toward domestic militarization: "As one federal court has explained, 'military personnel must be trained to operate under circumstances where the protection of constitutional freedoms cannot receive the consideration needed in order to assure their preservation. The Posse Comitatus statute is intended to meet that danger.' Army Lt. Gen. Russell Honore, commander of the federal troops helping out in New Orleans, seemed to recognize that danger when he ordered his soldiers to keep their guns pointed down: 'This isn't Iraq,' he growled.
"Soldiers are trained to be warriors, not peace officers -- which is as it should be. But putting full-time warriors into a civilian policing situation can result in serious collateral damage to American life and liberty."
Mr. Big Government
"In the Rose Garden on Tuesday morning, a reporter asked President Bush, 'Are you still a conservative?' The president's reply: 'Am I what?' Bush's surprise at the question is understandable. It's mind-boggling to think that anyone would challenge the president's credentials on that score, given his stand on taxes, government regulation, school vouchers and other key political barometers," states an editorial in The Los Angeles Times.
In the latest Cato Tax and Budget Bulletin, Cato's director of budget studies Stephen Slivinski uses revised data released during the summer by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to make side-by-side comparisons of the spending habits of each president during the last 40 years. While the data shows that all presidents presided over net increases in spending, George W. Bush is shown to be one of the biggest spenders of them all, even outpacing Lyndon B. Johnson in terms of discretionary spending.
"The increase in discretionary spending -- that is, all nonentitlement programs -- in Bush's first term was 48.5 percent in nominal terms," Slivinski writes. "That's more than twice as large as the increase in discretionary spending during Clinton's entire two terms (21.6 percent), and just higher than Lyndon Johnson's entire discretionary spending spree (48.3 percent)."
Holiday Dmitri, editor, hdmitri@cato.org
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