I encourage you all to
read the Court's opinion (PDF), but now let me explain what it means, legally:
- This court did not reach the ultimate question of "what were Terri Schiavo's actual wishes". That issue was addressed under Florida state law and its courts. The question presented here is whether any of her rights under the U.S. Constitution or federal law have been violated.
- Though Michael's attorneys challenged it, the Court presumed that the Congressional act was valid (so as to move on to the core issues) and granted jurisdiction here.
- This was a ruling on a motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) -- in other words, immediate relief (reinserting the tube) before the ultimate ruling on the merits.
- The standard for granting a TRO is that four factors must be met. The parents had no problem on three -- that irreparable harm would happen without a TRO, that the relief would benefit Terri more than it would harm the defendants, and that granting the relief would not be against the public interest. Michael did challenge the middle one, claiming that the invasive procedure to reinsert the tube would cause harm, but the Court held that Terri's death was a greater harm.
- Where they lost was on the main factor -- did the parents have a substantial likelihood of success on the legal merits. On this, the court held: (1) that the parents' due process claims regarding the unfairness of the Florida judges were meritless, and (2) her claims to "religious liberty" to follow her Catholic principles could not be litigated, because neither Michael nor the hospice were government officials.
Next Stop: the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Then Justice Kennedy has jurisdiction over emergency appeals from that Circuit, which he has denied before in this case. Then, the full Supremes.
One footnote: Michael's brief makes much ado out of the Supreme Court's opinion in Plaut v Spendthrift Farm (1995), with which I had been unfamiliar. In it, Justice Scalia wrote for the Court that a Congressional act seeking to allow federal courts to reopen final judgments in various securities matters was unconstitional. It's fascinating:
We think, however, that §27A(b) offends a postulate of Article III just as deeply rooted in our law as those we have mentioned. Article III establishes a "judicial department" with the "province and duty . . . to say what the law is" in particular cases and controversies. Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). The record of history shows that the Framers crafted this charter of the judicial department with an expressed understanding that it gives the Federal Judiciary the power, not merely to rule on cases, but to decide them, subject to review only by superior courts in the Article III hierarchy--with an understanding, in short, that "a judgment conclusively resolves the case" because "a `judicial Power' is one to render dispositive judgments." Easterbrook, Presidential Review, 40 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 905, 926 (1990). By retroactively commanding the federal courts to reopen final judgments, Congress has violated this fundamental principle. . . .
This sense of a sharp necessity to separate the legislative from the judicial power, prompted by the crescendo of legislative interference with private judgments of the courts, triumphed among the Framers of the new Federal Constitution. See Corwin, The Progress of Constitutional Theory Between the Declaration of Independence and the Meeting of the Philadelphia Convention, 30 Am. Hist. Rev. 511, 514-517 (1925). The Convention made the critical decision to establish a judicial department independent of the Legislative Branch by providing that "the judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." Before and during the debates on ratification, Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton each wrote of the factional disorders and disarray that the system of legislative equity had produced in the years before the framing; and each thought that the separation of the legislative from the judicial power in the new Constitution would cure them. Madison's Federalist No. 48, the famous description of the process by which "[t]he legislative department is every where extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex," referred to the report of the Pennsylvania Council of Censors to show that in that State "cases belonging to the judiciary department [had been] frequently drawn within legislative cognizance and determination." The Federalist No. 48, pp. 333, 337 (J. Cooke ed. 1961). Madison relied as well on Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, which mentioned, as one example of the dangerous concentration of governmental powers into the hands of the legislature, that "the Legislature . . . in many instances decided rights which should have been left to judiciary controversy." Id., at 336 .