Tom DeLay, delighted to keep public attention away from his ethical problems and his less attractive congressional activities, has plunged into the Terry Schiavo fight with both feet

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said that he and other Republican members of Congress would continue to work through the weekend to come up with a bill to force doctors to reinsert Terri Schiavo's feeding tube.

After a heated legal and political battle, the brain-damaged woman's feeding tube was removed Friday afternoon, despite a last-ditch effort by Congress to prevent it.

Mind you, Ms. Schiavo's higher brain centers have been replaced by liquids, so we're not talking about rehabilitation here. We're talking about the uninhabited body of Ms. Schiavo being kept alive as long as intensive medical care can keep it alive without higher brain centers. Dr. Frist, who has even less excuse, purports not to have made this connection either.

You may wonder why it is that Mr. DeLay doesn't just push through a bill requiring that people in a persistent vegetative state be kept alive by any means necessary.

Well, in other congressional news, the House (which apparently hasn't heard that the Senate has voted for billions in tax cuts) has declared that not slashing Medicaid is a "budget buster" and that they intend to hold the budget hostage unless they get the cuts in Medicaid they're demanding.

Mr. DeLay says that if the Senate doesn't pony up the cost of medical care for the poorest and most defenseless amongst us (including any low-profile long-term care patients out there whose parents have not made thriving careers out of life-sustaining litigation), Mr. DeLay plans to "assume" that the House numbers have passed the Senate and count on Our Fearless Leader to use his veto to force through the Medicaid cuts.

The tax cuts are, of course, a larger hit on the budget but are by virtue of giving more money to people who don't actually need it to survive revenue neutral.

Niether the Senate nor the House has any intention of doing anything about Ms. Schiavo's case other than keeping it in the limelight as long as possible.

Passing laws that would actually 'help' Ms. Schiavo would require them to acknowlege that government has a responsibility to make sure that people don't die for lack of medical care, and people dying for lack of medical care is a legislative priority in the budget negotiations this year.

So if they don't give a rat's ass about poor Ms. Schiavo or her sadly deluded family, why are they taking up the case so fervently?

Hey, don't take my word for it.

ABC News has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case. Among them: "This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited..." and "This is a great political issue... this is a tough issue for Democrats."

Republicans in congress assembled have set themselves up as the Terry Schiavo Medically Impossible Salvation Committee and Marching Society because it's distracting the american public from their fierce battle to make sure that the sick, the poor and the aged have no right not to starve to death or die for lack of basic medical care that Republicans care to respect in preference to more tax cuts to people who donate money to them.

Got that?

What Ms. Schiavo's congressional supporters are fighting for is the right to withhold care. Pure and simple.

By some limited definition of the words "pure" and "simple"

We could solve the Medicaid funding problem in one stroke by requiring WalMart to insure their workers rather than force taxpayers to subsidize it by throwing them onto Medicaid, but it's much simpler (and much more acceptable to Cokie Robert's brother, the heavily-funded chief lobbyist for WalMart, who appears to share his sister's somewhat eccentric view of the moral obligations conferred by parenthood) to let the poor, the weak and the old die.

This is a battle to give the government a right to tell anyone who has the misfortune to be poor that their children's lives and their parents' and their spouses' are worth nothing that the government has an interest in preserving.

Values voters, please note.

edit: Dr. Rivka, who is unlike Mr. DeLay a doctor and unlike Dr. Frist knows something about the brain and has reviewed something other than a heavily-edited video in researching her opinion, says more, better.