David Souter Quotes
There can be no stronger claim to a physician's assistance than at the time when death is imminent, a moral judgment implied by the state's own recognition of the legitimacy of medical procedures necessarily hastening the moment of impending death.
Souter, David. Concurring opinion. Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, Supreme Court of the United States, 26 June 1997, p. 782.
Sarah Palin, former Republican Governor of Alaska, coined a new term when she charged that proposed Health Care legislation would create a "death panel" See Palin Quotation 644138. It was an absolute lie totally made up by Palin. However a number of conservative members of Congress then repeated the prevarication in Congressional Debate and elsewhere. One poll showed that after it spread, about 85% of respondents were familiar with the charge and of those who were familiar with it, about 30% thought it was true and Palin's new term won the dubius distinction of winning the "Lie of the Year" award. Despite the fact that it was totally false, in order to win Obamacare be a single vote, the President had to eliminate the part of the bill that allowed payment to physicians to take the time and explain to patients and/or their families, the various options of palliative treatment during the last months of life. Many people thought that the doctors would form death panels.
In the next two years 50,000 non-Jewish, ill Germans were killed in hospital gas chambers disguised as shower rooms as the Germans later did with the Jews in the concentration camps.
David Hackett Souter is a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served from October 1990 to his retirement in June 2009. Appointed by US President George H. W. Bush to fill the seat that had been vacated by William J. Brennan Jr., Souter sat on both the Rehnquist and the Roberts Courts.
