GOP Slips Provision in Bill to Nullify Suicide-Aid Law

In a little-noticed move, conservative Republican lawmakers this week launched their latest effort to nullify Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law through a provision slipped into a catch-all tax and health care bill that passed the House late Thursday.

President Clinton opposes the overall bill, so its fate--and that of the provision affecting Oregon--remains unclear. Still, the episode is but one example of how, at the end of the congressional session, divisive measures are slipped into massive pieces of legislation and sometimes become law.

“The key thing here is that . . . proponents of a controversial bill can bypass the conflagration on the floor by slipping it into [a catch-all measure],” said Marshall Wittmann, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think-tank.

“It’s also unlikely that an issue like [the Oregon suicide law] would be taken up separately, so this vehicle is perfect,” Wittmann said.

The legislation explicitly would make it a crime--regardless of state law--for doctors to prescribe controlled substances such as morphine with the intention of hastening death. Violators would face mandatory prison terms of 20 years for the prescription of morphine, one of the most commonly prescribed painkillers. Although doctors could continue to prescribe noncontrolled substances in lethal doses, most say that other drugs would have to be taken in doses too large to be practical or with too high a likelihood of botched results.

The provision’s effect would be felt both in Oregon and in states that are considering allowing assisted suicide, such as Maine, which has a ballot measure on the issue in the upcoming election. There is division in the medical community over whether the practical effect of the bill would reach further than intended, discouraging all doctors who treat the terminally ill from prescribing adequate painkillers for fear of prosecution.

The insertion of the issue into a catch-all House-Senate conference report infuriated Oregon legislators, especially because conference reports cannot be amended or filibustered and so lawmakers are powerless to change them.

“The people of Oregon have gone to the ballot box twice to uphold the principles of assisted suicide,” said Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), who in floor debate accused conservative lawmakers of hypocrisy. “Every other day of the week [conservatives] are for states’ rights, but when a state does something they don’t like, they aren’t for states’ rights anymore.”

The debate on the issue, however, was never fully joined because it became caught up in the larger endgame politics of Congress. The measure was lumped with such similarly divisive issues as who should benefit from a 10-year, $240-billion tax cut bill and how much of a $28-billion, five-year health-care package should go to health maintenance organizations and hospitals, poor children and pregnant women.

In the framework of this larger picture, Clinton, in his remarks Friday about other year-end legislation in Congress, did not even mention his qualms about the ban on using controlled substances for legal assisted suicide in states.

But whatever the provision’s fate, from a political standpoint it has served the purpose of responding to some core conservative GOP supporters. The bill’s leading proponent in the Senate is Majority Whip Don Nickles (R-Okla.), and two of its biggest backers are the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Right to Life Committee.

“Social conservatives haven’t got that much out of this Congress,” Wittmann said. “This was an opportunity to give the base something on an issue that was of concern to them.”