By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 23, 2005; 9:41 AM

Republicans face political risk in the actions they took in the Terri Schiavo case. For Democrats, the risk is in the action they didn't take.

Republicans bucked public opinion and opened themselves up to charges of hypocrisy, that they deviated from their support for states' rights and the sanctity of marriage and their opposition to judge-shopping. Democrats, for the most part, stood by and watched.

In the Senate, it took only one Democrat to force a debate on the bill. But not even good old, reliable Ted Kennedy sought to force a floor vote, thus allowing the Schiavo bill to pass by unanimous consent. A few Democrats, including Sens. Carl Levin (Mich.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.) have spoken against the bill.

In the House, more than half of the Democrats didn't even bother to show up and vote. Seventy percent of Republicans came back from recess for the late-night vote on Monday morning.

The Schiavo case begs the question of whether voters will prefer a party that makes unpopular decisions to one that makes no decisions at all.

Democratic strategist David Sirota said the Schiavo case creates three impressions. "Firstly, Republicans are zealots," he said. "Secondly, where the hell are the Democrats? And thirdly, well, at least the zealots believe in something strongly. And that's the problem for Democrats right now on this issue, and a whole host of others. The party seems unwilling to stand up for anything controversial."

"The calculus by Democrats is that they don't want to offend anyone," Sirota said. "But in trying not to offend anyone, they lose support from everyone. What many Democrats haven't yet learned from Republicans is that it is better to be loved by some, and hated by others, than try to be liked by everyone. Because when you do that, you are liked by no one."

Democrats continue to fuss over the meaning of a November exit poll that indicated moral issues as the top priority for a plurality of voters. Most voters who cited morality as their top issue voted for President Bush. The poll and the November drumming set off a new round of soul searching among the party faithful, who wondered aloud what they could do to counter the party's Godless reputation.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) favored the Schiavo measure and helped negotiate its wording with Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tenn.), according to Jim Manley, a spokesman for Reid. There was no consistent position on the measure among Democratic senators, Manley said.

Of the 100 Democrats who showed up for the House vote, 47 supported the measure and 53 opposed it.

Other than Social Security, Democrats have found little to rally around, allowing GOP cakewalks on such issues as the bankruptcy and class-action lawsuit bills. But what makes the Democrats' handling of the Schiavo case so interesting is that a solid majority of the public appears to oppose to the GOP efforts.

In an ABC News poll, 63 percent of people said they supported the decision to remove Schiavo's feeding tube; 78 percent said they would not want to live under similar conditions; 70 percent of people said they were opposed to Congress's involvement; 67 percent said Congress was more concerned with politics than Schiavo's well being.

The intensity of the people who think Congress shouldn't have gotten involved could be one of the most important political aspects. Surprisingly, 58 percent who said they opposed congressional intervention were "strongly opposed," while only 14 percent of Americans who supported the Republican move supported it "strongly." Even among Catholics and evangelical Christians, only a minority supports the decision to continue feeding Schiavo by a tube. It undermines the theory that the Republican base -- though smaller on this issue, as it is on some other issues such as gun control -- is more energized.

In an op-ed in USA Today on Tuesday, House Majority Leader Tom Delay (Tex.) wrote that the Republican action was a moral obligation.

"Congress' obligation to protect such rights -- especially those of a woman who cannot protect herself -- is absolute," he wrote. "No legal, constitutional or political argument trumps that awesome moral duty of government to the governed -- and all but a handful of the 535 members of the House and Senate agreed with that proposition."

Some say it might even turn out to be a golden moment for Frist if he begins casting about for votes in the 2008 Republican presidential primary. For those who want to be president, pleasing the base is a far bigger priority at this stage of the exploratory process.

But Republicans have had to explain their deviation from their principled stand on states' rights. And the Schiavo case isn't the first time. The Bush administration has sought to undermine voter initiative on medical marijuana in California and on a right-to-die initiative in Oregon. They forced the Washington metropolitan area to put Ronald Reagan's name on National Airport. Bush and Republicans led the effort to push school choice and testing standards on states that opposed them.

I called the conservative Family Research Council to ask why the Schiavo case has become such a lightening rod and how the federal intervention squared with other conservative beliefs. If you had looked at the FRC's home page on Tuesday, the only thing you would have found was a link to an audio recording of Schiavo's father talking to his daughter. An FRC spokesman said the audio had received nearly 3.9 million page views -- an extraordinary number considering the FRC required listeners to register an e-mail address with them before opening the file.

Come to think of it, that's a lot of e-mail addresses that could be used for petitions or grassroots lobbying. Hmmm.

Jayd Henricks, FRC's director of congressional relations, said the unusual dynamics of intrafamily disagreement about Schiavo's wishes and conflicting reports about her level of responsiveness made her case unique.

Henricks said conservatives were concerned about the sanctity of marriage, but that Schiavo and her husband were married "by law only" because he has fathered two children by another woman and is "not acting as her husband."

The states' rights issue is moot, he said, because the Constitution allows federal judicial review of death penalty cases, and he said a medical patient should be offered no less protection. He said it wouldn't matter even if Republicans had shopped for a sympathetic hearing because the federal judge didn't give them the outcome for which they had hoped.

Perhaps the alleged contradiction generating the most buzz among bloggers this week is the story of Sun Hudson, a five-month-old boy who died last week after Texas Children's Hospital in Houston insisted on removing him from his ventilator. The hospital's decision was made possible by a law then-Gov. George W. Bush signed in 1999.

The measure allows for a patient's surrogate to make end-of-life decisions and spells out how to proceed if a hospital or other health provider disagrees with a decision to maintain or halt life-sustaining treatment. If a doctor refuses to honor the decision made by a surrogate, the case goes before a medical committee. If the committee agrees with the doctor, the guardian or surrogate has 10 days to seek treatment elsewhere.

Amid the gathering storm of the Schiavo controversy, Wanda Hudson fought a lonely battle to keep Texas Children's Hospital from removing her son from a ventilator. Mario Caballero, Hudson's Houston-based attorney said she prayed not only for her son's survival, but also for the sort of political intervention Schiavo had received. Neither Medicaid nor Hudson's bank account could cover the cost of prolonged care. When no other facility would accept him, Texas Children's pulled the plug, and Sun Hudson died seconds later, without fanfare or political outcry.

Henricks said he wasn't familiar with the Hudson case. But he noted that one apparent difference was that Schiavo was on a feeding tube and Hudson on a ventilator.

"You would certainly not have seen what we had with Terri Schiavo if she were on a ventilator," Henricks said. "While these are fine points of ethics, I think they are definitive how you deal with these situations."

Cabellero agreed there was a difference between the two cases. "This is not a feud between family members," he said about the Hudsons. "Here, what we are fighting is the medical health care industry. And that industry has a lot of money and a lot of political connections."

Ultimately, pulling the plug guaranteed death for Hudson, just as pulling Schiavo's feeding tube guarantees death for her.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Bush signed the Texas law because it created new protections for patients by creating the ability to appeal to a medical committee and imposing a 10-day waiting period before hospitals could end life-sustaining measures.

"When I look at it, it was unanimously adopted [by the Texas legislature], and it was a compromise agreement between the medical community and the right-to-life groups," McClellan said in an interview. "I don't know how anyone could view putting in place new protections to protect life as any way inconsistent with the president's views."

The Schiavo case is different from the Hudson case, McClellan said, also because there is a family dispute about the patient's wishes.

Political partisanship rewards predictability over ideological consistency. It is predictable that politicians will put politics over principle. The Schiavo case makes clear that neither party has an advantage over the other in that regard.