Ho Kay
Back when I was teaching electronics, I knew a fellow teacher named Chuck, who had been an Army Tech Sergeant. Chuck loved to pin me down and tell endless boring stories about his Army days. Each story was about some Lieutenant or other boss giving stupid orders, and the climax of each story was always the same: "So I sez Ho Kay, we'll do it your way." And Chuck led the other underlings in following the order precisely, with no allowance for real conditions; the Lieut finally understood and countermanded his stupidity when confronted with concrete consequences.

That's what we're seeing right now. In the long run it's a good thing that each "court" is following the letter of the law, because it will force more people to see the viciousness of the current setup. If any "judge" had allowed his decision to be shaped by a sense of mercy, or by political considerations, the public would relax. People would say "See, the system DOES work." Of course it wouldn't prove anything at all about the system; it would just let the system continue unabated. That's the normal course of affairs in hard cases like this.

I applaud Congress for attempting to assert its proper authority over the judiciary. It didn't work, which should give an error-correcting signal to Congress: something deeper needs to be fixed. Large sections of the judiciary need to be simply removed.

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A separate thought. Much of the tangled embroidery in this case involves medical definitions of various 'status' markers, like PVS. These definitions are imprecise and constantly changing, which means that we shouldn't try to base life-and-death law on such medical markers. Our ability to rehabilitate is also constantly improving. All of this is mirrored at the other end of life, in the debate over abortion. Technology has kicked out all the old "philosophical" definitions of life and death, many of which are enshrined in law. The only rational starting line is conception, and the only rational ending line is a total flatline of brain function. Any other lines are either religious in nature, involving some notion of "ensoulment", or just openly murderous, like Felos's spoon test or Pinsker's strange tests of volition.

So we see here, as in so many other areas (e.g. environmentalism) that the Left wants to rule by religious standards, while the Right wants to use strict science. Yes, I know the Left claims, even honestly believes, that it is the secular side, while the Right claims, or believes, that it is taking religious views into account. Both of those beliefs are objectively backwards.  ¶ 10:13 AM