How could they?

Updated By all that's merciful, how could they?

Atlanta, GA (CBC, March 30) - A U.S. federal appeal court agreed early Wednesday to consider a petition for a new hearing on whether to reconnect Terri Schiavo's feeding tube.

The ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, announced before 1 a.m. local time Wednesday, came as the brain-damaged Florida woman edged closer to death on her 13th day without nourishment. ...

The federal appeal court ruling was sure to surprise many legal experts, who said the Schindlers had exhausted all legal options after they lost two more appeals in Florida courts on Saturday.

And it brings false hope to the parents, renewed pain to the husband, more riches to the lawyers, more opportunities for pandering and tub-thumping by the drooling politicos, more time for Fox and MSNBC and CNN to run, rerun, and rerun again the manipulative videos and rehashed lies, and a further loss of human dignity to a woman who has, be thankful for small favors, no consciousness by which to understand what a circus freak others have made her into.

How could they?

Updated with the news that just 15 hours after agreeing to consider the petition for a new hearing, the court rejected it.

"Any further action by our court or the district court would be improper," Judge Stanley F. Birch Jr. wrote. "While the members of her family and the members of Congress have acted in a way that is both fervent and sincere, the time has come for dispassionate discharge of duty."

Accepting the petition, that is, scheduling a new hearing, would have required a majority of the 12-judge panel. My suspicion is that the agreement to hear the petition was the result of an action by just a couple of judges, whatever is the minimum required for that, and that Judge Birch's opinion was intended to put an end to such last-minute dealings.

Updated again with an interesting footnote: It turns out that Judge Birch is one of the most conservative jurists on the federal bench.

Birch authored opinions upholding Alabama's right to ban the sale of sex toys and Florida's ability to prohibit adoptions by gay couples. ...

Yet, in Wednesday's 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision to deny a rehearing to Schiavo's parents, Birch went out of his way to castigate Bush and congressional Republicans for acting "in a manner demonstrably at odds with our Founding Fathers' blueprint for governance of a free people - our Constitution." ...

Noting that it had become popular among "some members of society, including some members of Congress," to denounce "activist judges," or those who substitute their personal opinions for constitutional imperatives, Birch said lawmakers embarked on their own form of unconstitutional activism.

Actually, a second footnote, from the same article:

Michael Dorf, a Columbia University law professor and constitutional expert, said he's not surprised that Republicans made an apparent exception to limited government in the Schiavo case.

"Republicans are not categorically against opening federal courts where they think that doing so would produce politically conservative results," Dorf said. ...

In the political realm, he said, "repeated instances of hypocrisy can become consistency."

You got that right, prof.