The judge question

Tomas Sowell makes an important point: 19 judges have not reviewed the merits of the Terri Schiavo case.

Liberals can count all the judges they want, but that does not mean that all these judges agreed with the merits of the original court's decision. It means that they found no basis for saying that the original court's decision was illegal. ... What the law just passed by Congress did was authorize a federal court to go back to square one and examine the actual merits of the Terri Schiavo case, not simply review whether the previous judge behaved illegally. Congress authorized the federal courts to retry this case from scratch -- "de novo" as the legislation says in legal terminology.

That is precisely what the federal courts have refused to do.