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WASHINGTON - The Bush administration pressed the Supreme Court on Wednesday to block doctors from helping terminally ill patients end their lives, arguing that Oregon's law allowing physician-assisted suicide violates federal drug laws.
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"The most natural reading of the (federal) Controlled Substances Act is ... this falls within the authority of the attorney general," said Solicitor General Paul Clement, arguing on behalf of the Bush administration.
Oregon is the only state that lets dying patients obtain lethal doses of medication from their doctors, although other states may pass laws of their own if the high court rules against the federal government. Voters in Oregon have twice endorsed doctor-assisted suicide, but the Bush administration has aggressively challenged the state law.
Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor immediately challenged Clement, asking if federal drug laws also prevented doctors from participating in the execution of murderers.
Justice
Anthony Kennedy said he found it "odd" that the attorney general determined physician-assisted suicide to be an abuse of drug laws, when the state of Oregon strictly limited how the drugs could be administered and in what cases.
"I don't think it's odd," Clement replied, noting that federal laws regulating drug use have been in place for more than 90 years.
The case, the first major one to come before the new chief justice, John Roberts, will be heard by justices touched personally by illness. Three justices — O'Connor,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and
John Paul Stevens — have had cancer, and a fourth —
Stephen Breyer — has a spouse who counsels young cancer patients who are dying.
Their longtime colleague, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who once wrote about the "earnest and profound debate" over doctor-assisted suicide, died a month ago after battling untreatable cancer for nearly a year.
In 1997 the court found that the terminally ill have no constitutional right to doctor-assisted suicide. O'Connor provided a key fifth vote in that decision, which left room for state-by-state experimentation.
O'Connor is retiring, and Bush on Monday named White House lawyer Harriet Miers to replace her. If Miers is confirmed before a ruling is announced, O'Connor's vote will not count. A 4-4 tie would probably require the court to schedule a new argument session.
Dozens of spectators gathered outside the court before arguments began, waving signs supporting the Oregon law. "My Life, My Death, My Choice," read one sign. "Who should decide? Me" said another.
"Oregon ought to be proud of having taken the first step," said one of the law's supporters, Rowland Cross, of Arlington, Va.
The appeal is a turf battle of sorts, not a constitutional showdown. Former Attorney General
John Ashcroft, a favorite among the president's base of religious conservatives, decided in 2001 to pursue doctors who help people die.
Hastening someone's death is an improper use of medication and violates federal drug laws, Ashcroft reasoned, an opposite conclusion than the one reached by
Janet Reno, the Clinton administration attorney general.
Oregon filed a lawsuit to defend its law, which took effect in 1997 and has been used by 208 people.
The Supreme Court will decide whether the federal government can trump the state.
"It could be close," said Neil Siegel, a law professor at Duke University and former Supreme Court clerk. "It is a wrenching issue. It's one of the most difficult decisions any family needs to make. There's a lot of discomfort with having the government at any level get involved."
Under Rehnquist's leadership the court had sought to embolden states to set their own rules. Roberts, who once served as a law clerk to Rehnquist and worked as a government lawyer, may be sympathetic to Bush administration arguments that the federal government needs ultimate authority to control drugs.
In this case, that would be at odds with the concept, popular among conservatives, of limiting federal interference.
Clement, the administration's Supreme Court lawyer, told justices in a filing that 49 states, centuries of tradition, and doctors groups agree that "assisted suicide is 'fundamentally incompatible' with a physician's role as healer."
The administration lost at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which said Ashcroft's "unilateral attempt to regulate general medical practices historically entrusted to state lawmakers interferes with the democratic debate about physician-assisted suicide."
In Oregon, the first assisted-suicide law won narrow approval, just a 51 percent majority, in 1994. An effort to repeal it in 1997 was rejected by 60 percent of voters.
"There is a real human need" for control over one's life, said cancer patient Charlene Andrews of Salem, Ore. "We are terminal and we know when we have a few weeks left. We know when we're unconscious. We know when we're at the end."
The case before the Supreme Court is Gonzales v. Oregon, 04-623.
