The View From 1776

A New York Times editorial dated November 10 argues that the task of moving stem cell research to the next level cannot be left to the states...As this page has argued before, stem cell research is of such importance and promise for the entire world that it deserves to be carried forward by a national program underwritten by federal funding.

Impelling the Times’s editorial pronouncement was the recent defeat in New Jersey of a $450 million bond issue for local stem cell research, a measure championed by the state’s socialist governor Jon Corzine.  So far, liberals don’t have the votes in Congress, either.

Implicit in the Times’s editorial is the tactic that led the 1973 Supreme Court in Roe Vs Wade to ignore individual states’ Constitutional prerogative to exercise police powers, which are maintenance of law and order and protection of public health and safety.  When the public opposes a liberal-progressive-socialist cause, liberals use judicial activism to do an end run around elected legislators and impose their will upon the majority.

James Madison is generally agreed to be the most influential single delegate to the 1787 Convention which drafted the Constitution.  Judicial activism that infringes upon the Constitutional prerogatives of the states contrasts starkly with what Madison wrote on this subject in Federalist No. 45:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.

The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects [the so-called police powers] which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

From a purely practical viewpoint, overriding the necessarily lengthy state-by-state debate in the 1960s and 70s on the issue of abortion had the effect of throwing a match into a tank of gasoline.  Passions aroused by the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s were blown up into a cultural war that still rages.  Even arch-liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, before joining the Court, lamented that it would have been far less divisive to have allowed the debate to proceed in each of the states, rather than imposing by judicial fiat what Justices thought the law ought to be.

What characterizes liberal-progressive-socialism in the legislative and judicial arenas is its endless succession of rushes to judgment, usually with unanticipated harmful ramifications arising from unwarranted Federal intervention into private businesses and private lives.  An example of the moment is the Federal mandates and subsidies for ethanol (see Liberal Economic Fog).

Unwillingness to respect objections to a program or to abstain from legislative or judicial enactment is justified by the presumption that liberal-progressive-socialist doctrine is ipso facto scientific truth, and that opposition can come only from ignorance.

Despite liberals’ assertion that stem cell technology is an established methodology to cure a vast array of humanity’s medical and genetic ills, it is far from a sure thing.  See Stem Cell Nihilism.

At this point it’s little more than a prospective boondoggle for researchers eager to acquire Federal research funding annuities for life.  See Stem Cell Research Boondoggle.

In the context of social morality Charles Krauthammer put it this way in an earlier column (Stem Cell Miracle?):

You don’t need religion to tremble at the thought of unrestricted embryo research. You simply have to have a healthy respect for the human capacity for doing evil in pursuit of the good. Once we have taken the position of many stem cell research advocates that embryos are discardable tissue with no more intrinsic value than a hangnail or an appendix, then all barriers are down. What is to prevent us from producing not just tissues and organs but humanlike organisms for preservation as a source of future body parts on demand?

South Korea enthusiastically embraced unrestricted stem cell research. The subsequent greatly heralded breakthroughs—accompanied by lamentations that America was falling behind—were eventually exposed as a swamp of deception, fraud and coercion.

An additional danger is that a potentially unscientific program may become fixed by Federal funding, shutting off other avenues of research. 

As we see with the destructive aftermath of Federal ethanol policy, once it becomes Federally funded and develops a voting constituency, there will be no turning back, nor rational adjustment.  Fetal cell research will become enshrined, as have so many liberal-progressive-socialist cult fetishes, as a “constitutional right.”

Be forewarned.

The New York Times is generally thought to be the trend-setting voice of liberal-progressive-socialism in the United States.  We can expect great pressure on liberal Senators henceforward to add Federal stem cell research to their litmus tests for Federal court nominees.  Adding this to the abortion test means that Christians and religious Jews will be excluded altogether from Federal judgeships.

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