This weekend the GOP-led Congress yet again revealed its duplicitous face by deciding to intervene in the tragic Terri Schiavo case.  Eager to jump on the "pro-life" bandwagon to throw some marrow to the religious right, GOP leaders are trying to slop together an ill-conceived bill that would give a federal judge - presumably one hand-picked by Congress - the authority to review a decision by a Florida judge to remove Schiavo's feeding tube.  This move by Congress is all the more alarming because a federal court has already ruled that the Schiavo case should be decided on state grounds. 

Thus, the GOP leaders have dumped their principles for the sake of political gain.  Longtime vigorous defenders of State's rights and the Separation of Powers have once again decided that "values" trump more trivial matters like the Constitution, particularly with the 2006 elections on their minds.  If all goes according to plan, Congress and President Bush will sign into law a bill that exists solely as a means for judicial activism - precisely what the same members of Congress fought so bitterly when so-called activist judges in Massachusetts, and more recently in California, gave homosexual couples the right to marry.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan defended this encroachment upon the Tenth Amendment - which, to conservatives, next to the right to bear arms is the most hallowed of all the Bill of Rights - by parroting Senator Bill Frist's hypocritical plea: "This is about defending life."

Regardless of how you feel about the issues underlying the Terri Schiavo case, you cannot support Congress' intervention.  For Congress to stick its nose in this case at this juncture after the Florida courts have been weighing the competing interests for seven years is nothing short of appalling.  It is political grandstanding at its worst.  The GOP's monumental hypocrisy mirrors that of Schiavo's home state: In a state that executes prisoners at the most rapid rate in the country, its license plates state "Choose Life."

For GOP politicians the vigor to defend life - like their party's core principles - is all in the timing.