Will Congress take action on assisted suicide?

Frist's role in Schiavo controversy
The conventional wisdom in Washington is that Senate Majority Leader Frist was politically burned by his involvement in the Terri Schiavo case last March. At one point Frist, himself a cardiac surgeon, took to the Senate floor to question doctors’ diagnosis that Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state.

But Miranda said Frist must also be mindful that social conservatives are unhappy with him due to his call for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.

A Senate GOP staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Tuesday, “I could see legislation happening, but not getting traction” because some senators would want to avoid summoning up memories of the Schiavo episode and sensitive end-of-life issues.

Republican pollster Whit Ayres said, “There may be some people who are gun shy because of the Schiavo case, but this is a different issue. Public opinion opposed the involvement of elected officials in an individual case where there was a serious family dispute, but that is fundamentally different from establishing national policy. People understand that it is Congress’s job to establish national policy.”

The constitutionality of the Oregon law was not an issue in Tuesday’s decision.

No constitutional right at stake
Tuesday's ruling does not overturn Washington v. Glucksberg, a 1997 decision in which the high court said there is no constitutional right to assisted suicide.

"For over 700 years, the Anglo-American common-law tradition has punished or otherwise disapproved of both suicide and assisting suicide,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist said in Washington v. Glucksberg.

(Former Rehnquist law clerk and now Chief Justice John Roberts was one of the three dissenting justices Tuesday, along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.)

Spindelman said some advocates had urged the high court to re-consider the Glucksberg decision but “the Supreme Court flatly refused to take the invitation.”

In the Glucksberg case, those seeking to overturn the ban on assisted suicide claimed that the “liberty” spoken of in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution included the liberty to assist a gravely ill person in killing himself.

But Rehnquist said liberty has to be based on “fundamental rights found to be deeply rooted in our legal tradition.”

Physician-assisted suicide is not “deeply rooted” in American laws, but it is at least “rooted” in one state and conservatives want to outlaw it before it does become deeply rooted nationwide.

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