Most of the rest of us remember the Terri Schiavo fiasco as a dramatic and deeply alarming event in which a collection of American lawmakers took it upon themselves to intervene in a family's personal medical tragedy so that it could be made a frothing national circus of other people's deep religious convictions, and that is still me putting it nicely because it is impossible to concisely describe just how
deplorable, lie-riddled, extra-legal and roundly cynical the efforts were. Then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was at the heart of the campaign and played a pivotal role in nationalizing it, a role that is sure to come up as he campaigns to be the third member of the Bush household to hold the presidency.
Yes sir, he will have to answer for this incident to the Iowa voters. Even after all this time, they are outraged—that he did not simply ignore the courts and the laws and snatch away Terry Schiavo's near-corpse by force.
“I’m displeased with Governor Bush,” [Reverend Cary Gordon] said in an interview this week. “He could have informed law enforcement, called up the National Guard, or told the county sheriff’s office not to let it happen.” [...]
“Just because a judge wants to kill somebody, that doesn’t give them the authority to do it,” said Brian Rosenor, a former chairman of the Woodbury County, Iowa Republicans. “Two state troopers in front of her door would have saved her life. Jeb Bush could have done more.”
If there is one constancy of the far-right movement from Cliven Bundy to Cary Gordon to Sean Hannity, it is that American law should come second to conservative morals and that the proper response to American laws that get in the way of those conservative morals is to send over some people with guns to ensure those
wrong laws do not get enforced. It has been this way since long before the Selma marches, and will likely remain the reflexive response of deeply Christian and/or Constitution-minded people for many decades to come.
You may have the law on your side, you sinners and/or the entire American court system, but let's just see what my line of state troopers has to say about your goddamned law.
And Jeb Bush? Jeb Bush (below the fold) can't get enough of it.
[Bush] allies were privately thrilled with tough stories recently in the Tampa Bay Times and Politico that revisited the family tragedy, showing how the hard-charging Bush combined policy with his religious and moral beliefs to nearly lead the state into a constitutional crisis. At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week outside of Washington, Bush told the crowd he had no regrets over the fight.
You may have seen those stories as point-by-point takedowns of Jeb Bush as conniving ass seeking to circumvent laws he was charged with enforcing for his own political and ideological profit, an effort that degraded after his defeat into a bitter governor-led
smear campaign against a single American man, but Jeb Bush sees them as his ticket to credibility in the ever-growing American proto-fascist movement. He actually pulled quotes from them
to use in his own ads.
So there you go. No, he's not sorry. Yes, he's probably going to have to declare in Iowa that next time around maybe he'd do even more, maybe as president he would have sent the military in to snatch the body and spirit it away, courts be damned. Or perhaps his efforts to lead his state "nearly" to a constitutional crisis instead of completely over the edge of one will serve to buff his centrist credentials in the primary, since national Republican leaders seem to be judged these days primarily on how many near-constitutional crises they can muster up during a given legislative year, and he will coast through those primaries as the sensible, reasonable southern governor who did not use his state troopers to block court decisions even though he was sorely tempted to.
Isn't that a comforting thought? Jeb Bush will be running in part on his previous documented willingness to dodge American laws and court decisions when he thinks the more proper approach is to do whatever he wants instead. He's a true conservative leader, like a Vladimir Putin, that one. On the other hand, no matter what his past history or campaign rhetoric now surely no member of the Bush family would stoop to flagrantly ignoring American law once we had installed them in the White House, so there is probably nothing to worry about.