Obama directed his FDA to ban drugs that states used to carry out death penalty
Liberals have always been against the death penalty even for the most heinous murderers. And one of their tactics to block this penalty has been to argue that it violated the Constitution's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment."
So to make the penalty as painless as possible, states changed their method of execution to...drugs that simply put the murderer to sleep.
Now, even though drug abuse kills roughly 60,000 Americans every year, liberals have always been in favor of decriminalizing drug use. Except for this use. And their tactic?
Under President Barack Obama, the Food and Drug Administration ordered states to stop using drugs to execute the most heinous killers...on the grounds that the agency had not approved the drugs being used for lethal injection.
Really.
And you need to be totally certain that no federal bureaucrat or cabinet secretary would have done this without Obama's explicit direction.
Trump is changing that. Three weeks ago the head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel published a common-sense opinion that drugs used for execution don't need FDA approval.
How did this insanity get started?
In 2009, the U.S. manufacturers stopped producing sodium thiopental, one of the drugs used in three-drug lethal injection protocols. This forced states to look for supplies abroad--and the liberals were ready: In 2011, attorneys for convicted killers from Arizona, California, and Tennessee sued to get the FDA to ban all imports of sodium thiopental. Next, in 2012 a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against importation of the drug--on the grounds that while the FDA had approved the drug for other uses, it hadn't approved it for executions.
The FDA cited this injunction when it seized thiopental shipped to Arizona and Texas in 2015.
It didn’t matter to the federal judge that the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection under a three-drug protocol by a 7-2 vote in 2008.
Nor did it matter that, in 2000, the Supreme Court ruled Congress did not give the FDA authority to regulate tobacco on the grounds that “there is no safe or therapeutic purpose to smoking,” wrote Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. And since the sole purpose of execution is putting a convicted murderer to death…
Obama’s FDA went along with a bad judicial decision without regard to Supreme Court rulings and states’ rights because this allowed Obama to do something liberals wanted but without seeming to be responsible for it himself. "Hey, I didn't order that. Don't know who did it or how it happened. I just read about it in the papers the same time you learned about it."
Okay, that's not a quote, but if you think this is hyperbole consider that in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, Obama outlined his perfect straddle: “While the evidence tells me the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes — mass murder, the rape and murder of a child — so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment.”
Ah. So the community is justified in meting out the penalty, but that doesn't mean liberals like Obama should actually let the penalty be carried out, eh?
Then he let his FDA do the bidding of death row inmates who had been convicted in court. In 2015 the Supreme Court upheld lethal drug execution. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito argued, “Because it is settled that capital punishment is constitutional,” it “necessarily follows that there must be a (constitutional) means of carrying it out.”
All four inmates behind the suit had been sentenced to death for heinous crimes. One hired a man to bludgeon his employer to death. One murdered his 9-month-old daughter. One murdered a food service supervisor in prison, and the fourth anally raped and murdered an 11-month-old girl.
Yet despite Obama having claimed in his book that he supported the death penalty for exactly these heinous crimes, he quietly authorized the head of his FDA to block all four executions--and all others.
Had he told voters the truth about his positions--on this, or marriage, or Obamacare or a host of other things, it's likely voters would never have elected him.
H/T American Spectator.
So to make the penalty as painless as possible, states changed their method of execution to...drugs that simply put the murderer to sleep.
Now, even though drug abuse kills roughly 60,000 Americans every year, liberals have always been in favor of decriminalizing drug use. Except for this use. And their tactic?
Under President Barack Obama, the Food and Drug Administration ordered states to stop using drugs to execute the most heinous killers...on the grounds that the agency had not approved the drugs being used for lethal injection.
Really.
And you need to be totally certain that no federal bureaucrat or cabinet secretary would have done this without Obama's explicit direction.
Trump is changing that. Three weeks ago the head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel published a common-sense opinion that drugs used for execution don't need FDA approval.
How did this insanity get started?
In 2009, the U.S. manufacturers stopped producing sodium thiopental, one of the drugs used in three-drug lethal injection protocols. This forced states to look for supplies abroad--and the liberals were ready: In 2011, attorneys for convicted killers from Arizona, California, and Tennessee sued to get the FDA to ban all imports of sodium thiopental. Next, in 2012 a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against importation of the drug--on the grounds that while the FDA had approved the drug for other uses, it hadn't approved it for executions.
The FDA cited this injunction when it seized thiopental shipped to Arizona and Texas in 2015.
It didn’t matter to the federal judge that the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection under a three-drug protocol by a 7-2 vote in 2008.
Nor did it matter that, in 2000, the Supreme Court ruled Congress did not give the FDA authority to regulate tobacco on the grounds that “there is no safe or therapeutic purpose to smoking,” wrote Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. And since the sole purpose of execution is putting a convicted murderer to death…
Obama’s FDA went along with a bad judicial decision without regard to Supreme Court rulings and states’ rights because this allowed Obama to do something liberals wanted but without seeming to be responsible for it himself. "Hey, I didn't order that. Don't know who did it or how it happened. I just read about it in the papers the same time you learned about it."
Okay, that's not a quote, but if you think this is hyperbole consider that in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, Obama outlined his perfect straddle: “While the evidence tells me the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes — mass murder, the rape and murder of a child — so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment.”
Ah. So the community is justified in meting out the penalty, but that doesn't mean liberals like Obama should actually let the penalty be carried out, eh?
Then he let his FDA do the bidding of death row inmates who had been convicted in court. In 2015 the Supreme Court upheld lethal drug execution. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito argued, “Because it is settled that capital punishment is constitutional,” it “necessarily follows that there must be a (constitutional) means of carrying it out.”
All four inmates behind the suit had been sentenced to death for heinous crimes. One hired a man to bludgeon his employer to death. One murdered his 9-month-old daughter. One murdered a food service supervisor in prison, and the fourth anally raped and murdered an 11-month-old girl.
Yet despite Obama having claimed in his book that he supported the death penalty for exactly these heinous crimes, he quietly authorized the head of his FDA to block all four executions--and all others.
Had he told voters the truth about his positions--on this, or marriage, or Obamacare or a host of other things, it's likely voters would never have elected him.
H/T American Spectator.
posted by SF at
4:51 PM
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