Judge to Obama administration: Yes, I meant it, stop tax-paid embryo research
Loved this headline, as if judges are supposed to rule on the basis of liking or disliking cases at hand…
Yesterday Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia denied the Obama administration’s emergency request to lift his August 23 temporary injunction against federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
Lamberth based his decision on the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, which bans such funding.
Obama’s lawyers argued Lamberth’s decision would do irreparable harm to research already underway and would also stop research funding authorized under the Bush administration of embryonic stem cell lines already created.
Lamberth, pictured on page 2, was quite snippy, writing:
Defendants are incorrect about much of their “parade of horribles” that will supposedly result from this Court’s preliminary injunction.
Plaintiffs agree that this Court’s order does not even address the Bush administration guidelines… The prior guidelines, of course, allowed research only on existing stem cell lines, foreclosing additional destruction of embryos.
Plaintiffs also agree that projects previously awarded and funded are not affected by this Court’s order….
Additionally, since plaintiffs anticipate filing their motion for summary judgment by September 10… the length of time this preliminary injunction will be in place should be limited.
In this Court’s view, a stay would flout the will of Congress, as this Court understands what Congress has enacted in the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. Congress remains perfectly free to amend or revise the statute. This Court is not free to do so.
Congress has mandated that the public interest is served by preventing taxpayer funding of research that entails the destruction of human embryos. It is well-established that “[i]t is in the public interest for courts to carry out the will of Congress and for an agency to implement properly the statute it administers.” Mylan Pharms., Inc. v. Shalala….
NIH funds research projects this way, as described by Science magazine:
When NIH disburses a grant, it doesn’t hand the money over to the researcher’s institution. Instead, the Treasury has a special account that the institution draws down to pay an investigator’s research project expenses. Technically, the money is held by the Treasury Dept. and is paid out gradually over the year.
So while NIH has begun funding some escr projects, if Lamberth’s ruling stands, federal funding will stop midstream. This means, according to the New York Times:
But if the ruling is upheld, the government will be forced to suspend $54 million in financing for 22 scientific projects by the end of September. An additional 60 projects are threatened….
In 2009, the health institutes spent $143 million to underwrite more than 330 scientific projects using human embryonic stem cells, and it estimated that it would spend another $137 million in this fiscal year, which ends in September.
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Is that really the headline? Seriously?
Good – and maybe they can use the money to help build quality housing for the poor or new small schools for children. How about free medical clinics for the poor – but not planned parenthood. How about good adult-education or food for those in need. Many other uses for the money that would help put people to work, and help others….
This is one ruling that is a good one.
Someone actually put the word “dis” in a headline on purpose? Unironically? In a major newspaper?
I don’t know of anyone who uses that word unironically in conversation. News reporting is such a joke these days.
Hey Lauren and Keli, yes, it is an actual LAT headline. I just provided a hyperlink in the article.
Thank you Jill for always exposing the truth. Obama needs to brush up on the United State’s 3 levels of government. We have the judiciary so the executive cannot force his way into the lives of the people! Embryonic stem cell research has done nothing except create harmful tumors. Stop messing with creation, leave it up to God Almighty! I applaud that judge for holding his ground.
Nick, you are a troll, so everything I saw will go in one ear and out the other, but Lamberth explained in his ruling why your line of reasoning doesn’t fly.
“Despite defendants’ attempt to separate the derivation of ESCs from research on the ESCs, the two cannot be separated… Simply because ESC research involves multiple steps does not mean that each step is a separate ‘piece of research’ that may be federally funded, provided the step does not result in the destruction of an embryo.” (as quoted by The Hindu and originally linked here by Jill).
To put it another way, simply because an applicant is seeking money to do something that doesn’t directly cause or require the destruction of an embryo, seeking money that indirectly causes or requires an embryo’s destruction still counts. You can’t pick apart the steps of a connected process and claim that they aren’t related to each other when the first step (killing an embryo) is necessary to get to the next one (whatever research applicant X wants to do).
Keli Hu,
The same reasoning Nick argued is used to allow harvesting of parts of aborted babies at abortion clinics. A company will exist in the abortion clinic to take parts out of the aborted babies and “provide” them to other companies for research or whatever. It is a way to not sell parts, but make money on the parts. It is every bit as disgusting as embryo research.
http://www.abortiontv.com/Misc/BabyPartsForSale.htm
It is another sacrifice to Baal.