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As you read this, Terri Schiavo lies dead. Executed by the state of Florida at the request of noted death advocate George Felos acting in behalf of her husband Michael. Executed without trial by jury, without congressionally ordered federal appeal and most cruelly, despite her family's heroic efforts to feed and care for her.

That the termination of an innocent, brain-damaged yet otherwise healthy woman has taken place is reason enough to grieve. More mournful still is the state of our government and the cultural circumstances that brought us to this sad day.

Weep for Terri if you must, but also for the precious loss of the constitutional balance of powers, so sagely crafted by our Founders, that should have prevented this most awful event. This ravaging of our system of government begins and ends with a judiciary drunk with power; a power that has yet to be reined in by the formerly co-equal branches.

Congress, as is its prerogative, passed a bill that provided an order to the federal courts to conduct a new, or de novo, trial to determine whether Terri's constitutional rights were violated by the Florida courts. The bill specified further:

"The District Court shall entertain and determine the suit without any delay or abstention in favor of State court proceedings, and regardless of whether remedies available in the State courts have been exhausted."

Yet, instead of conducting the mandated new, fact-finding trial, U.S. District Judge James Whittemore quickly ruled, "Theresa Schiavo's life and liberty interests were adequately protected by the extensive process provided in the state courts." Higher courts then completed the congressional nose-thumbing, right up to the Supreme Court.

Even as that highest court in this land has defined the execution of underage murderers as "cruel and unusual punishment," they have refused to even consider whether the same can be said of the state-ordered starvation of an innocent woman.

Even as they usurp state law in finding federal 'rights' to sodomy, affirmative action and same-sex marriage, an appeal to protect Terri's most basic right fails to move them.

Even as they forbid every state from deciding the life-and-death issue of abortion, they have now allowed the state of Florida to adjudicate the life or death of a guiltless American citizen on hearsay evidence.

Even as the heinous industry of pornography is glorified as art and ordered protected by the First Amendment, a practicing Catholic is denied her religious rights under same.

Now that the death lobby, the leftist media and the ACLU have another scalp under their judicial belts, they will speak in hushed tones about the sadness of this case but pompously claim that the rule of law must be served.

Yet they ignore the most basic tenets of our legal system; first that our rights are God-given and second, that the U.S. Constitution alone dictates the relationship between the judicial and legislative branches.

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