Ripples and cross-currents

I wonder if the medical profession will soon regret its star turn in the death of Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo. Doctors are heavily invested in posing as caring professionals who protect patients from heartless HMOs and soulless bureaucracies. But we now know that many of them do not fit that Marcus Welby image. They seem a little too eager to kill the weakest.

The medical talking heads also did not do the profession any favors with their adamant, intolerant certitude. A profession which is so eager to trumpet their self-assurance cannot expect much leeway from juries in malpractice cases. Since they know everything worth knowing, there is no room for honest, unavoidable error.

The Schiavo fight made a lot of libertarians angry and some have threatened to leave the GOP big tent. A less talked about worry for those ubiquitous “GOP strategists” who show up on TV is the possibility that values conservatives will explore non-traditional alliances. For example, we have long known that there are millions of Hispanic and African-American voters who are conservative on social issues but who vote Democratic. For a generation, political strategists have thought that this could be used to draw these voters into the GOP. That has not happened and will not happen anytime soon.

In the short-term the party will be an uncertain trumpet on values issues. Therefore, there is no reason to focus only on converting values Democrats into Republicans. Increasing the number of “family values” Democrats is more useful than electing a handful of Sullivan-approved Republicans. Maybe a more productive strategy is to work in the Democratic primaries for congress and the state houses. On our issues, more John Dingels and fewer Barney Franks is a big win.

Patterico made a good point about the legal machinations of the Schiavo case:

Innocents who have been released from Death Row have almost never gained their freedom through the orderly workings of the system. In many cases, the defendant’s innocence has been established due to the efforts of activists who have no official role in the criminal justice system. The fact that innocents have left Death Row is no tribute to the criminal justice system.

The simple fact is that the appellate process is not a great place for correcting incorrect factual findings by the trial court.

There is a conservative critique to be made of the legal system that goes beyond bitching about liberal judges. (See here for one example.) Too often our criminal proceedings fall far short of justice. Who knows what alliances could be forged if conservatives reject their knee-jerk positions on crime and punishment.