Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is preparing his presidential run, which is to say roaming the country attempting to lock up big donors, since all the nonsense about policies and positions and why anyone should trust him any farther than they can throw him can be sorted out afterwards. Meanwhile, Politico's Michael Kruse takes a long look back at Jeb's intimate and pivotal role in one of the worst moments of recent legislative memory:
the Terri Schiavo fiasco. It's worth a read, primarily as reminder of Bush's willingness to continually elevate the case and its surrounding sideshow no matter how many courts decided (and they
all decided) against him.
Michael Schiavo hasn't forgiven or forgotten, calling Jeb Bush a "coward," and minces no words when it comes to describing what became, in the end, Jeb's seemingly personal vendetta against him.
“It was such an abuse of authority,” [a lawyer for Schiavo] said. “I think that really raises red flags about his character and his fitness to be president. Jeb didn’t get his way in the Schiavo case. I think he tried to take it out on Michael.”
That, Michael Schiavo said this month, is what makes Jeb Bush “vindictive.” “Knowing that he had no standing in this, he made it worse for everybody,” he said. “He made life, for a lot of people—the nursing home people, the local police, lawyers—he made everybody miserable.”
What makes him “untrustworthy,” he said, is that he fought the courts as long as he did just because he didn’t like the decisions they kept making. “I wouldn’t trust him in any type of political office,” he said.
Of special note in the Schiavo case is that all of the advocates of legislative intervention Jeb included either knew that they were on clearly unconstitutional grounds or should have quickly figured that out after the courts repeatedly told them so. The Florida law demanding single-case intervention was unconstitutional on its face, as was the later bill passed by a Republican Congress and signed in dramatic fashion by Jeb's more important but much stupider brother. A lot of people remain concerned that someone who uses their office to fight for clearly unconstitutional laws based on their own religious theories of what they'd like to see happen instead
does not have the stuff of a good president.
“Trying to write laws that clearly are outside the constitutionality of his state, trying to override the entire judicial system, that’s very, very dangerous,” said Arthur Caplan, a New York University bioethicist who edited a book about the Schiavo case. “When you’re willing to do that, you’re willing to break the back of the country.”
“It was appalling,” said Jon Eisenberg, one of Michael Schiavo’s attorneys and the author of The Right vs. the Right to Die. “And I think it’s important for people to understand what Jeb Bush is willing to do. It’s important for people to know who Jeb Bush is, and the Terri Schiavo case tells us a great deal about who Jeb Bush is.”
Worth a read. It'll be interesting to see whether Jeb—sorry,
Jeb!—embraces his past role in that humiliating episode of American legislative bungling or if he tries to bury it. It'll probably depend on who's asking.