AddieStan

Readers of this blog have doubtless become familiar, over the last several days, with the name John Bolton. Mr. Bolton is President Bush's nominee to the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and he appears to be a rather bad man. He also personifies the go-it-alone, we've-got-all-the-toys-so-shut-up modus operandi of the Bush administration, only with attitude. (For a little context here, consider how Rodney Dangerfield once characterized his nabe: "I come from a neighborhood so tough that Bella Abzug was the Avon lady.") For a vigorous discussion of how the Democrats should handle the thorny topic of Bolton's confirmation hearings, go to Steve Clemons' The Washington Note . Here's Clemons: No Bush diplomatic nominee has ever been uniformly opposed by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The fact is moderate Republicans despise Bolton as well -- they do. Party tectonics are complicating them voting their conscience -- but Bol...

In her last few months, as Terri Schiavo lay in a state of suspended animation, that state of neither quite life nor death, she became a symbol of many things: of our nation's confusion about and rejection of death, of the heartlessness of liberalism, the phantasmagoria of radical authoritarianism, the opportunism of Congress and, not least of all, the unmeetable twain of the great national divide. In death, one hopes, she becomes flesh again, a mere mortal. Godspeed. For a clear-eyed, blow-by-blow look at the case as it coursed its way through the courts over the past few days, look at Tim Grieve's blogging for Salon's 'War Room.'

At last, a member of the judiciary involved in the Schiavo case has been willing to call a spade a spade. In yesterday's appeal by Terri Schiavo's parents to the 11th Circuit federal Court of Appeals, one of the judges on the panel issued an opinion devoted to the peril posed to the Constitution by congressional intervention in the case. (It was legislation passed by Congress that allowed the case to live another day in the federal system after all appeals had been exhausted in the Florida state courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court had refused to hear it.) The New York Times reports: The 11th Circuit court's decision, signed by Chief Judge J. L. Edmondson, was only a sentence long. But in a concurring opinion, Judge Stanley F. Birch Jr., appointed by the first President Bush in 1990, wrote that federal courts had no jurisdiction in the case and that the law enacted by Congress and President Bush allowing the Schindlers to seek a federal court review was unconstitutional. ...

From our World Federalist friends at StopBolton.org : “While the United Nations needs to be better equipped so that it can meet the challenges of the 21st century, John Bolton is not the right person to spearhead this critical reform effort,” said Don Kraus, vice president of Citizens for Global Solutions . “Bolton [President Bush's nominee for the post of ambassador to the U.N.] has proven himself to be a divisive diplomat, with a track record of breaking bonds rather than creating coalitions. He has long argued: ‘[T]here is no such thing as the United Nations… [but merely] an international community that occasionally can be led by… the United States when it suits our interest.’" (See StopBolton.org for video clip of Bolton's speech from February 1994, Global Structures Convocation.)

Today your blogstress fears that she has used up all of her creative writing time trying to get Blogger.com to publish the (finally) unscrambled version of yesterday's post. How sad is that, what with Wolfie traipsing through Europe, the first lady in Afghanistan and Jerry Falwell and the pope both flirting with the great beyond? Talk amongst yourselves, please. (Then send your Webwench the transcript.)

...to republish today's post, which seems to have been eaten by Blogger.com. Working on it, though..

While your blogstress, with the rest of America, engaged in the distraction of pontificating on the Schiavo case, elsewhere in the world folks find themselves less concerned with the future of the U.S. Constitution (though they may want to ponder that), or the tragic circus into which Terri Schiavo's final days have devolved, than the implications of two critical appointments made by President Bush to international bodies: that of John Bolton to the post of U.N. ambassador and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to president of the World Bank. It's hard to know which of these is more frightening. Bolton's background harkens back to the bad old days of the Nicaraguan contras--the army of thugs set up in the 1980s by the U.S. to topple the socialist Sandinistas--or Wolfowitz, a believer in the spread of "doable" wars, who has no background in finance or banking. On the Bolton appointment, the Associated Press reports a chorus of concern from around the world ...

Just as yesterday she made note of the 47 Democrats who, on Sunday night, betrayed the U.S. Constitution (and hence, the American people), today your blogstress celebrates the five brave Republicans who, during the House vote on a bill that yanked the Schiavo case from the jurisdiction of the Florida courts, voted in favor of the government created by the Framers: Ginny Brown-Waite (Fla.) Michael N. Castle (Del.) Charles W. Dent (Pa.) David G. Reichert (Wash.) Christopher Shays (Conn.) Most impressive among them is Mr. Shays, who seems to be getting over playing nice, calling it as he sees it. Last night on "Hardball", Shays reiterated what he told the New York Times' Adam Nagourney earlier in the week: "My party is demonstrating that they are for states' rights unless they don't like what states are doing," said Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, one of five House Republicans who voted against the bill. "This couldn't be a mo...

Today's activity around the case of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman whose future her family is famously fighting over, reached a frightening level of absurdity when Florida Governor Jeb Bush stood poised to the sieze custody of Schiavo. Then some sort of sanity ensued when the Supreme Court of the United States, in a cryptic decision, refused to order the reinsertion of Schiavo's feeding tube, as her parents had wanted and her husband did not. Alas, the high court, according to news reports, offered no real reason for its refusal. Your blogstress hopes against hope that it was based on the unconstitutionality of the congressional vote that brought the matter before the Supreme Court for a fifth time. And if that's the case, it's a lesson the American people desperately need to hear. In fact, your cybertrix thinks that a concerted, organized campaign to educate the public on just what exactly the Constitution says is in order, and she would gladly wield a cha...

If you're looking for a bright spot in the maelstrom, consider the several ways in which elements of the GOP appear to be poised for a rift. In today's New York Times , Adam Nagourney tells us that not all Republicans--nor all conservatives, for that matter--are cheered by Congress's trampling of the Constitution in the Terri Schiavo case: "This is a clash between the social conservatives and the process conservatives, and I would count myself a process conservative," said David Davenport of the Hoover Institute, a conservative research organization. "When a case like this has been heard by 19 judges in six courts and it's been appealed to the Supreme Court three times, the process has worked - even if it hasn't given the result that the social conservatives want. For Congress to step in really is a violation of federalism." Read Nagorney's piece Several days ago, the Washington Post 's E.J. Dionne, Jr., wrote of another tear in the makin...

WASHINGTON, D.C.--As the Terri Schiavo case wends its way back up to the highest court in the land, the United States Constitution is gasping for breath. But if, like most Americans, you get your news from the broadcast media, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this case, as well as the extraordinary congressional vote that took place on Sunday, was about one family's quest to save their daughter's life. And who can blame them for taking their quest to whatever quarter would hear them? Yet, with Congress's cynical vote to override the jurisdiction of a state court, the crisis of Terri Schiavo's parents has brought the nation to its own crisis. A constitutional crisis. Lest you think your blogstress seized by the hyperbole demon, she asks her gentle reader to consider just what it means when the nation's top legislative body refuses to let an exhausted judicial process stand, simply because it rejects the court's decision. The U.S. Supreme Court, after a...