John Roberts

John Roberts: Portrait Of A Coward

PORTRAIT OF A COWARD

Cardinal Dolan of NY, Cardinal Wuerl of D.C., Notre Dame--And 40 Other Catholic Dioceses and Organizations Sue Obama Administration

From: CNSNews.com

The Archdiocese of New York, headed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., headed by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the University of Notre Dame, and 40 other Catholic dioceses and organizations around the country announced on Monday that they are suing the Obama administration for violating their freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

The dioceses and organizations, in different combinations, are filing 12 different lawsuits filed in federal courts around the country.

The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. has established a special website--preservereligiousfreedom.org--to explain its lawsuit and present news and developments concerning it.

"This lawsuit is about an unprecedented attack by the federal government on one of America’s most cherished freedoms: the freedom to practice one’s religion without government interference," the archdiocese says on the website. "It is not about whether people have access to certain services; it is about whether the government may force religious institutions and individuals to facilitate and fund services which violate their religious beliefs."

The suits filed by the Catholic organizations focus on the regulation that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced last August and finalized in January that requires virtually all health-care plans in the United States to cover sterilizations and all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptives, including those that can cause abortions.

The Catholic Church teaches that sterilization, artificial contraception and abortion are morally wrong and that Catholics should not be involved in them. Thus, the regulation would require faithful Catholics and Catholic organizations to act against their consciences and violate the teachings of their faith.

Earlier, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had called the regulation an "unprecedented attack on religious liberty" and asked the Obama administration to rescind it.

“We have tried negotiation with the Administration and legislation with the Congress--and we’ll keep at it--but there's still no fix," Cardinal Dolan, who is also president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a statement released by the conference this morning.

"Time is running out, and our valuable ministries and fundamental rights hang in the balance, so we have to resort to the courts now," the cardinal said. "Though the Conference is not a party to the lawsuits, we applaud this courageous action by so many individual dioceses, charities, hospitals and schools across the nation, in coordination with the law firm of Jones Day. It is also a compelling display of the unity of the Church in defense of religious liberty. It's also a great show of the diversity of the Church's ministries that serve the common good and that are jeopardized by the mandate--ministries to the poor, the sick, and the uneducated, to people of any faith or no faith at all.”

Cardinal Dolan's New York Archdiocese filed suit today in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of New York. Joining the archdiocese as plaintiffs in the suit are the Catholic Health Care Sytem, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre, Catholic Charities of Rockville Centre, and Catholic Health Services of Long Island.

In their suit, these groups name HHS Secretary Sebelius, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and their departments as defendants.

The archdiocese of Washington, D.C., is being joined in its lawsuit by Catholic Charities of the Washington Archdiocese, the Consortium of Catholic Academies of the Archdiocese of Washington (which includes four parochial schools), Archbishop Carroll High School, and the Catholic University of America.

"This morning, the Archdiocese of Washington filed a lawsuit to challenge the mandate, recently issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, that fundamentally redefines the nation’s long-standing definition of religious ministry and requires our religious organizations to provide their employees with coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives, and sterilization, even if doing so violates their religious beliefs," Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington said in an open letter posted online this morning. "Just as our faith compels us to uphold the liberty and dignity of others, so too, we must defend our own."

"The lawsuit in no way challenges either women’s established legal right to obtain and use contraception or the right of employers to provide coverage for it if they so choose," said Cardinal Wuerl. "This lawsuit is about religious freedom."

"The First Amendment enshrines in our nation’s Constitution the principle that religious organizations must be able to practice their faith free from government interference," Cardinal Wuerl said.

911 Call: As Botched Abortion Injures Woman, Abortionist Laughs

From: LifeNews.com

The transcript of a 911 call a late-term abortion practitioner made to emergency personnel when a botched abortion victimized a woman at his abortion facility shows Martin Haskell laughing.


As LifeNews reported, a woman was rushed to a local hospital in the Cincinnati suburb of Sharonville, Ohio after appearing to have suffered from a botched abortion at the facility run by the abortion practitioner credited with promoting partial-birth abortions.

Operation Rescue has obtained a recording of a 911 call placed by Haskell after one of his patient suffered life-threatening seizures following an abortion. The call reveals Haskell was unsure of the patient’s age and described her as 19 or 20 years old. He told an emergency dispatcher that she had experienced “status epilepticus” since coming out of anesthesia. Status epilepticus is a life-threatening condition in which the brain is in a state of persistent seizure lasting more than 5 minutes.

The pro-life group indicates Haskell is heard laughing at the dispatcher when she offered him additional emergency instructions until the emergency responders could arrive.

“Haskell is a danger to the public, plain and simple. We are urging the Ohio Department of Health to rescind Haskell’s variance and close his dangerous abortion clinic immediately in the interest of public safety,” said Troy Newman, President of Operation Rescue and Pro-Life Nation.

Newman complains Haskell has no hospital privileges as required by law and points out Haskell has received a variance from the Ohio Department of Health to continue operating as long as other physicians agree to cover his abortion complications once patients have been admitted. One of those physicians, William T. Bowers II, has been disciplined in two states and is under criminal investigation in another.

Newman is urging pro-life advocates and other concerned Ohio citizens to contact the ODH and ask them to rescind Haskell’s variance and close his abortion clinic.


Dr. Steven Brinn, a pediatrician whose offices are next door to the Women’s Med Center abortion facility, commented on the incident.

“Today, March 28, paramedics with ambulance and police were called to Haskell’s Abortion Clinic in Sharonville and this was witnessed by many,” Brinn said. “”A young woman was seen being carried out on a stretcher by paramedics who were bagging the woman (giving life support). It is assumed that the woman suffered some kind of complication in the clinic while she was there for treatment. Police were also at the scene and closed down the clinic for a time.”

“Some of us in the SHD [Sharonville Health Department] and in the Medical community have worried about the care being unsafe at the Haskell Abortion Clinic and have heard of many other examples of 911 calls and ambulance calls,” Brinn added.

Paula Westwood, Executive Director of Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati, commented on the potential failed abortion.

“The Women’s Medical Center is one of several abortion facilities owned by abortionist Martin Haskell, who has championed the gruesome late-term partial birth abortion procedure,” she said. “The WMC remains open despite the fact that Haskell could not comply with a regulation requiring an Ambulatory Surgical Facility (ASF) to have a transfer agreement with an area hospital to handle complications from his procedures.”

Much to the chagrin of pro-life advocates and local Sharonville officials, the Ohio health department has updated an arrangement that allows Haskell to continue doing abortions without following state law requiring him to have a transfer agreement at a local hospital.

In 1996, Ohio passed a law requiring that all ambulatory surgical centers must be licensed by the state and, in 1999, it came to the attention of the Ohio Health Department that abortion clinics were not in compliance with the law, having never applied for licensing. The OHD began the process of insuring that all abortion clinics came into compliance.

Haskell refused to comply and, after years of court and administrative battles, the administration of former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland granted a variance [exception] allowing  the late-term abortion practitioner to open a new abortion facility in Sharonville, Ohio, the Women’s Med Center at 11250 Lebanon Road. The state gave him this variance on the condition that he maintains privileges at an area hospital, a lesser standard than a transfer agreement.

Haskell’s variance has been modified and Ted Wymyslo, the health department director, says Haskell is no longer required to have privileges at an area hospital or a transfer agreement.  He is allowed to operate by having his partner, Roslyn Kade, and two other Cincinnati doctors, David Schwartz and Walter J. Bowers, handle his emergency complications.

That decision is meeting with strong condemnation from Virgil Lovitt, the mayor of Sharonville and president of the Sharonville Board of Health.

“Now, Martin Haskell can continue to perform abortions without meeting these requirements, and he can replace his skills with other doctors that, also, do not need to meet the written state regulations,” he said. “Any abortionists working at the Women’s Med Center are now covered by the credentials of Dr. Haskell’s partner, Roslyn Kade, and two doctors off-site.  This has expanded the variance to beyond the career of this 71-year old abortionist.  Martin Haskell can finally retire and his late term abortion center will legally be able to operate indefinitely.”

Lovitt says the concerns are not merely hypothetical as the abortion clinic has already experienced botched abortions just one year after opening.

“Haskell’s two-day process for late term abortions has already produced one stillborn baby in a hotel toilet and another in a car on the way to an ER,” he said. “These complications are difficult to track, and there are probably more than we know. There are pro-life sidewalk educators outside the abortion facility, and it is estimated that this location is performing about 200 abortions each month.”

In August, Lovitt joined Mike Gonidakis of Ohio Right to Life, Paula Westwood of Cincinnati Right to Life, and Colleen Gerke of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati in a meeting with Wymyslo about Haskell where Lovitt says he “begged the new director not to liberalize the variance if Martin Haskell’s privileges at an area hospital changed.”

Westwood also complained about the health department’s decision, saying, “This expanded variance for the Women’s Med Center needlessly caters to the abortion industry at the cost of many unborn babies’ lives.”
She is calling on pro-life advocates to contact the following officials “to ask why the state of Ohio is helping the abortion industry.”

Jeffrey Toobin: Plane Wreck For Obamacare

Justices signal possible trouble for health insurance mandate

From: Los Angeles Times

The Supreme Court's conservative justices Tuesday laid into the requirement in the Obama administration's healthcare law that Americans have health insurance, as the court began a much-anticipated second day of arguments on the controversial legislation.

Even before the administration's top lawyer could get three minutes into his defense of the mandate, some justices accused the government of pushing for excessive authority to require Americans to buy anything.

"Are there any limits," asked Justice Anthony Kennedy, one of three conservative justices whose votes are seen as crucial to the fate of the unprecedented insurance mandate.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested that the government might require Americans to buy cellphones to be ready for emergencies. And Justice Antonin Scalia asked if the government might require Americans to buy broccoli or automobiles.

"If the government can do this, what else can it ... do?” Scalia asked.

The tough questioning of the administration's lawyer is no sure sign of how the justices will rule when they hand down their decision in the case, Department of Health and Human Services, et al., vs. State of Florida, et al., likely in June.

But Tuesday’s arguments may signal trouble for the mandate, widely seen as a cornerstone of the law's program for achieving universal healthcare coverage for the first time in the nation’s history.

With the court's four liberal justices expected to vote to uphold the sweeping law, the administration will have to win over at least one of the five justices on the court's conservative wing.

Few believe Justices Clarence Thomas or Samuel A. Alito Jr. will support the mandate. That has made Scalia, Kennedy and Roberts the focus of intense speculation for months.

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. tried to argue that the insurance mandate would not open the door to other requirements to buy products because healthcare is unique.

"Virtually everyone in society is in this market,” said Verrilli, who was prodded on by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other liberal justices. That means that if someone elects not to get health insurance but then gets sick, as everyone will, that person will pass along costs to everyone else, Verrilli explained.

To prevent that, the administration has argued that that Congress can use its authority under the commerce clause of the Constitution to impose the mandate as a means to regulate health insurance.

The Constitution says Congress has the power to "regulate commerce" and to impose taxes to promote the general welfare. The court has in the past upheld federal laws regulating all manner of business -- from agriculture and aviation to who can be served at the corner coffee shop -- and Roberts, Scalia and Kennedy have in other cases supported the government’s broad authority in that area.

But Tuesday, the three -- and Alito -- repeatedly criticized the requirement to buy health insurance as forcing people to enter a market, which they said was a new and troubling use of federal power.

"That changes the relationship of the individual to the federal government," Kennedy said.

The architects of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act included an insurance requirement after years of experience with insurance markets suggested that it is very difficult to guarantee health insurance to everyone, including people with preexisting medical conditions, without a way to induce younger, healthier people to get covered. That offsets the cost of insuring older, sicker ones.

Under the law, most Americans, starting in 2014, will have to get a health insurance plan that meets a basic set of standards or pay a tax penalty that will rise from $95 in 2014 to $695 in 2016. (The penalty for a family will be up to $2,085 in 2016.)

Health policy experts warn that without some incentive to get insurance, people could wait until they got seriously ill and then sign up for coverage, pushing up premiums for everyone.

The mandate was once embraced by both political parties. But more recently, it has been seized on by conservative critics of the healthcare law as an egregious example of government overreach. And it became the crux of lawsuits challenging the healthcare law by 26 states and plaintiffs represented by the conservative National Federation of Independent Business.

Over the last two years, federal courts across the country have issued conflicting rulings on the insurance requirement, though only one appellate court has backed the constitutional challenge to the law. Two high-profile conservative judges have supported the mandate.

American Crossroads: "Individual Mandate: Obama v. Obama"