Remember putting off your homework?

Remember when you were in school, and the teacher gave you a term paper to do? They always said “Get started on it now, you don’t want to put this off till the last minute!” The good students always got started on the project and did a great job. The rest of us slapped it together at the last minute because we were lazy screw-offs with better stuff to do. Terri Schiavo has been in a vegetative state for something like fifteen years, and her case has been in the courts for at least ten years. Something like 19 different judges have heard this case, and the Supreme Court, which we know moves like greased lightning, has declined to hear it twice. Congress finally swung into action this weekend, just after the feeding tube was removed. Do you get the sense that our Congressmen are the lazy screw-offs that sat in the back of the room? And we’re talking serious procrastination if we can measure it in decades.

U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., said: "This is not a political issue. This is an issue about saving a life." House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said. "We're here to help a dying woman." Gosh, I would think that they could have done that any time in the last ten years. Trying to get some legislation passed now that things are desperate and there are people demonstrating and the media is all over the case seems a little like grandstanding to me. Certainly our super-smart and super-enlightened Congressmen would never resort to something so tawdry as turning this family’s tragedy into a cheap political ploy to curry favor with conservatives and right to life groups, would they?

Maybe the fact that last week they dragged a batch of baseball superstars out of spring training and into a hearing to find out about steroids that has me wondering if Washington D.C. is in some strange time zone we don’t know about. I mean, Mark McGwire’s big season was like seven years ago now, and Barry Bonds had his monster 73 homer year in 2001. Congress is looking into steroids now? Why? Didn’t baseball just enact a system to deal with the issue? What am I missing here? I just hope that soon Congress with get around to dealing with the real issues, like that wall the Soviets built in Berlin and finding out who really sank the Battleship Maine.