Looks like someone just soiled their armor and has decided to run away:

The autopsy of Terri Schiavo – particularly the findings that she had irreversible brain damage and was blind – left Republicans who had pushed so aggressively for federal intervention struggling on Wednesday to defend their argument that she should have been kept alive.

Senator Mel Martinez, the Florida Republican who pressed the case most, said he has since had second thoughts about Congress’s involvement.

“I really probably come to the view this has to be more resolved at the state level, seems like the kind of issue the state courts deal with,” Mr. Martinez said.

Senator Martinez, March 16, 2005:

Terri is severely brain-damaged ? of that there is no question. However, many media reports have indicated that she is in a persistent vegetative state. There is evidence to the contrary.

She is not on a respirator or other 24-hour-a-day medical equipment. She responds to voices, touch, and the presence of people. She can smile, cry, and establish eye contact.

Last week, I introduced my first piece of legislation in the Senate: The Incapacitated Person?s Legal Protection Act of 2005. This bill would ensure that incapacitated individuals ? like Terri Schiavo ? would have their due-process rights of habeas corpus when a court orders their death by removal of nutrition, hydration and medical treatment. My colleague from Florida, Congressman Dave Weldon has introduced identical legislation in the House of Representatives. […]

In essence, this legislation would give incapacitated individuals like Terri, who have been given what amounts to a death sentence by the courts, federal habeas corpus protections to ensure that she receives the same due process protections as convicted murderers given the death penalty. [Emphasis added. — Good thing he didn’t refer to Florida hospitals as the Gulag of our time. –S,N!]

Back to today:

The case has also given Democrats ammunition to use against the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, a transplant surgeon who, on the Senate floor, voiced his opinion about Ms. Schiavo’s condition based on videotapes in which she appears reactive to some stimuli.

Aides to Dr. Frist, a likely presidential candidate in 2008, angrily said he had never made a formal diagnosis and thus had nothing to retract.

Dr. Teardrops of AIDS, March 19, 2005:

Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a renowned heart surgeon before becoming Senate majority leader, went to the floor late Thursday night for the second time in 12 hours to argue that Florida doctors had erred in saying Terri Schiavo is in a “persistent vegetative state.”

“I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office,” he said in a lengthy speech in which he quoted medical texts and standards. “She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli.”

As someone else said at the time:

Laurie Zoloth, director of bioethics for the Center for Genetic Medicine at Northwestern University, said she was surprised to hear Frist weigh in, given that he has not examined Schiavo. “It is extremely unusual — and by a non-neurologist, I might add,” Zoloth said in an interview.

So it all goes back to Seinfeld:

ELAINE: Wow! That is unbelievable. The pain is totally gone!
JERRY: What’s even more amazing is his formal training is in paediatrics.