Death Wish Obstacle

It isn't often that one story has three intriguing angles to it.

***There's this legislative directive that has been passed annually with the HHS appropriation since 1996 called the (I swear I'm not making this up) Dickey-Wicker Amendment that states, in summary:

"[R]esearch in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed for research on fetuses in utero" is strictly prohibited.

Sounds pretty unambiguous, doesn't it?  But it didn't stop the Obama regime from "establishing guidelines" through HHS Oberfuehrer Sebelius that opened the floodgates for human embryo annihilation anyway.  Guidelines that are, by definition of law, illegal.

An interested party (see below) filed suit against these unambiguously lawless HHS guidelines, and, wonder of wonders, federal district court judge Royce Lamberth actually applied the law and issued an injunction blocking them:

In sum, plaintiffs have demonstrated a strong likelihood of success on the merits. The Dickey-Wicker Amendment is unambiguous. It prohibits research in which a human embryo is destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subject to risk of injury or death greater than that allowed under applicable regulations. The Guidelines violate that prohibition by allowing federal funding of ESC research because ESC research depends up on the destruction of a human embryo.

As if to demonstrate their (at best) disinterest in the law and its applicability to policies they want, libs expressed astonishment at this knuckledragging wingnut ruling:

The ruling came as a shock to scientists at the National Institutes of Health and at universities across the country, which had viewed the Obama administration’s new policy and the grants provided under it as settled law. Scientists scrambled Monday evening to assess the ruling’s immediate impact on their work.

“I have had to tell everyone in my lab that when they feed their cells tomorrow morning, they better use media that has not been funded by the federal government,” said Dr. George Q. Daley, director of the stem cell transplantation program at Children’s Hospital Boston, referring to food given to cells. “This ruling means an immediate disruption of dozens of labs doing this work since the Obama administration made its order.”

Of course they viewed The One's lawless guidelines as "settled law".  Didn't the Israelites view the Ten Commandments as "settled law" after Moses brought the tablets down from Mt. Sinai and they finished dancing like nuts around the golden calf?  Didn't the 2008 election end politics for good?  Finally settle the 221-year-long argument Americans have been having with each other over whether the country is going to be what the founders envisioned or be leveled to be like the Old World from which our forefathers fled in favor of the latter?  Establish Barack Hussein Obama as our "some kind of a god" forever and ever, amen?  That's what every Obamunist thought.  "The law" was whatever B.O. decreed, and it never occurred to these modern-day Mengeles that anybody COULD challenge it, much less that it could be blocked or reversed.

Thus will the growing ranks of "disgruntled" lefties pissed at Red Barry for not delivering Obamatopia all in one gulp be further augmented.

***Who are the plaintiffs in this suit?  Why, REAL scientists, of course:

[Y]ou may (or, if a cynic about government like me, may not) be surprised to learn who the lead plaintiffs were in the lawsuit filed against Obama's executive order allowing the resumption of federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Focus on the Family? Nope. Dick Cheney? Nope.

The plaintiffs (at least the only ones who weren't removed by a lower court for lack of standing) were two scientists whose work involves research on adult stem cells and who didn't want to have to compete with researchers on embryonic cells for limited federal research funds. Judge Lamberth issued his preliminary injunction against federal funding for the embryonic cell research, citing the likelihood of "irreparable harm to the plaintiffs" as well as "public interest considerations."

Because, as has been chronicled in this space many, many, many times, adult stem cells are everything embryonic stem cells are not: a panacea of quasi-miraculous medical cures and therapies that are of immense benefit and blessing to countless people suffering from chronic, painful, and terminal diseases and disorders.  Or, to put it more bluntly, ASCs work, and ESCs don't - if the objective is actually medical in nature.

But health care isn't the point of the Left's obsession with ESCs.  Killing countless human embryos is.  Death is.  Medicine is just the moral camouflage and pretext.  Otherwise they would acknowledge the practicalities that ESCs are a barren dry well, medical fool's gold, and ALL such researchers would focus on ASCs, where the disease-curing action is.

***Ross Kaminksky also makes the valid point that the federal government has no constitutional business subsidizing any kind of stem cell research at all, just as it needs to get out of most everything else it has its functionally limitless tentacles plowing into.  But if stem cell research had to rely entirely on private funding, eventually ESC monies would dwindle because it would become so glaringly obvious that they were being squandered.  Which is why ESC research gets propped up with government subsidies in the first place, and why Dr. Chicago issued his deck-stacking illegal "guidelines".

Don't worry, though, Mengeles; your tin deity will simply reissue your sacred grim reaper edict no matter what Judge Lamberth says.  He won't let a robed fascist who doesn't know his place in the New Order stand in the way of "progress".