“The patient then was a 65-year-old drilling contractor, badly injured in a freak accident at his home. … In 1988, however, there was no such fiery rhetoric as the congressman quietly joined the sad family consensus to let his father die. … Doctors advised that he would ‘basically be a vegetable,’ said the congressman’s aunt, JoAnne DeLay.”

The product liability lawsuit that followed, a class of tort which DeLay later described as “frivolous [and] parasitic,” and sponsored a bill to outlaw, would be like an added bonus if this whole thing wasn’t so sad and wrong.