If there is one person who can always be counted upon to defend the indefensible, it's Alan Keyes. In the past he's defended the authority of states to establish theocracies. Now he is defending the authority of the Florida governor to ignore anything done by courts of the legislature, if it suits his agenda.

Alan Keyes writes in World Net Daily (because they have no intellectual standards when it comes to right-wing diatribes):

The Florida state constitution declares unequivocally that in the state of Florida "the supreme executive power shall be vested in a governor … ." The word supreme means highest in authority. There can be no executive authority in the state of Florida higher than the governor. No state law can create an executive authority higher than highest in the Florida constitution. Therefore no court order based upon such a law can constitutionally create such an authority.

If the governor tells the local police in Pinellas County to step aside, they must do so, or else be arrested and tried for an assault on the government of the state, which is to say insurrection. ... Since Florida's highest law grants him supreme executive power, the governor's action would be lawful. No one in the Florida judiciary can say otherwise...

This attitude is consistent with the insistence of other conservatives that President Bush has the authority to ignore laws and treaties when he thinks that it would serve the interests of national security to do so (for example, to torture terrorism suspects).

Ed Brayton comments on Keyes' article:

Surely he doesn't really believe that "executive authority" means that the governor can do whatever he wants, regardless of the law. Executive authority means precisely that, the authority to execute the laws of the state of Florida, not to decide on his own that the courts are wrong in trying the law and therefore he can declare their rulings invalid of his own authority. The law in Florida says that a patient has the right to refuse treatment, and it further says that such refusal can be verbal and does not have to be in writing. The Florida courts heard testimony and determined that there was credible evidence that Terri herself would not want to live in the situation she is in, and therefore they ordered that those wishes be carried out. Having "executive authority" does not mean that the Governor can decide of his own accord that the court was wrong in its judgment. Indeed, to do so is to nullify the very purpose for which we have courts in the first place.

I think that Brayton is giving Keyes too much credit. Yes, I think Keyes really does believe that the governor can do whatever he wants, regardless of the law. This would be consistent with other positions he has adopted in the past — when individual rights stand in the way of the authority of the state or religious institutions, then individuals have to lose.

Brayton is quite right that the law is on the side of Michael Schiavo, but I'm not sure that the "law" matters to as many so-called conservatives at it used to. That's a real shame because adherence to principles like the rule of law was always one of conservatism's basic virtues. Today, though, that virtue has degenerated in the vice of raw greed for power and authority.

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• Terri Schiavo: News & Issues