On March 18, 2005, the House and Senate subpoenaed Terri Schiavo, ordering her to appear as a witness before committees in both chambers. No one in Congress was waiting to hear what she had to say—everyone knew that Schiavo couldn't say anything. She had been in what doctors called a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years, although her husband, Michael, had long said that she wouldn't have wanted to be kept alive in such a condition. When, a couple of weeks later, she finally, indisputably died, at a hospice in Pinellas Park, Florida, an autopsy found that her brain was so atrophied that it was probably less than half the size it had once been. Instead, the point of the subpoenas, pushed by the Republican leaders Bill Frist and Tom DeLay, was to theatrically invoke federal "witness protection" laws to threaten anyone who removed her feeding tubes with the crime of obstructing her appearance before Congress. Republican aides told reporters that the penalty might be five years in prison.
DeLay and Frist were just late-game entrants in the fight for Schiavo's body, or, rather, the fight to turn what was left of it into a political object. The politician who had the most to say about Terri Schiavo was Jeb Bush, who was governor of Florida then and now seems to be running for President. In 2003, when a court affirmed Michael Schiavo's right, as Terri’s guardian, to have her feeding tube removed, Jeb Bush pushed a law through the Florida state legislature giving him the power to overrule the court—and so “stormed to the brink of a constitutional crisis,” as the Tampa Bay Times put it in a review of the case earlier this year, going “all in on Schiavo.” The bill was called "Terri's Law," but, in terms of decision-making, it was all Jeb’s. He then issued an executive order and, as Michael Kruse described it in an piece for Politico last month, "A police-escorted ambulance whisked her from her hospice in Pinellas Park to a nearby hospital to have her feeding tube put back in." When a judge overturned Terri's Law, and the Supreme Court let that ruling stand, Bush turned his efforts to lobbying Congress, at a time when his brother was President.
Bush's new campaign has brought Schiavo's story back. E-mails about the case were among those he recently released, and last week Michael Schiavo wrote a letter to the editor of the Miami Herald, warning voters against "trusting" Bush, who Schiavo said "abused the powers" he had as governor. "He made life miserable for my family, the doctors and staff at the nursing home, the police—all because he wanted to involve himself in something that both the law and common human decency told him that no government official should have gotten involved in," he wrote. Schiavo is giving other interviews as well.
There are those for whom the case is seen not as an embarrassment for Bush but as a conservative credential. The (http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/march-20-2005-terri-schiavo-9179707) remain vivid—in a hospital room, as her parents attempt to get her to look at a balloon and exhort her to show that she realizes that they are there and that they love her. Her parents saw the videos as evidence of her mind's presence, and proof that she should be kept alive. Many viewers, looking into Schiavo's drifting eyes, had a sense only of the power of wishful affection to see something that was not there. The doctors who examined her saw nothing else. Schiavo's parents came to despise her husband, whose intentions they impugned. Their supporters called Michael Schiavo a murderer. The family was Catholic, and their religious beliefs were taken as an irrefutable license to levy such attacks. After Congress, on a March weekend, passed another dubious bill, DeLay decided to call it the "Palm Sunday Compromise." (A judge soon dispensed with DeLay's witness-protection ploy.) Much of the passion had to do not with Schiavo, or even the right to die, but with an issue for which her case was taken as a proxy: abortion. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote at the time, "Her lack of awareness actually increased her metaphoric usefulness. Like a sixty-four-cell blastocyst, she was without consciousness. Unlike the blastocyst, she was without potential. If letting her body die is murder, goes the logic, then thwarting the development of the blastocyst can surely be nothing less."
The abortion debate, which has hardly abated, is just one of the ways that the Schiavo case retains its emotional resonance. (As governor, Jeb Bush worked to restrict reproductive rights, at one point trying to get a guardian appointed for the fetus of a disabled rape victim.) There are others: it is something of a kaleidoscope, mixing up the unknowns about the human brain and the mysteries of marriage. Jeb Bush and other politicians dismissed the medical and scientific consensus on Schiavo's condition because it didn't fit their political preferences; that tendency remains, in areas from climate change (about which Jeb has said that he's a "skeptic") to immunization. Schiavo died, as far as doctors could tell, because she had an undiagnosed potassium imbalance, possibly because she had forced her weight down from some two hundred and fifty pounds, from when she was in high school, to about a hundred and ten, when she collapsed at the age of twenty-six. Her husband believed that she suffered from bulimia. There was a malpractice settlement that seems to have had a large place in her parents' imagination, but, when it came down to it, was not worth much—a million dollars, consumed before she died by medical expenses and legal fees. Before it was over someone made a half-stunt offer to Michael another million dollars if he'd divorce Terri and give her parents the rights to her body. (If nothing else, the Schiavo case is a reminder of why same-sex marriage, and the legal protections it brings with it, is vital to so many couples.) Michael Schiavo began living with another woman while Terri was still being sustained by the feeding tube, and had two daughters with her. The slurs and threats they received show that you don't need Twitter for a certain sort of mass-whispering hysteria. "People used to say they would steal my children," Schiavo told Fox News last week.
When people ask, between now and Election Day, 2016, what the Schiavo case was about—pity or bitterness, faith in God or science, conviction or political posturing, the judiciary against the executive, or maybe arrogance—their interest may be in Jeb Bush's motives. Examine the Schiavo case, and try to find the moderation that is so often casually ascribed to Jeb: it isn’t easy. It's worth sorting out the balance of pragmatism and ideology in his character, as well as his interest in playing to the G.O.P. base and his own Catholic faith—but the policy consequences are the same. That’s clear in Bush’s manhandling use of Terri Schiavo.
Then there is Bush’s sense of how far to push, and that he was entitled to do so. In August, 2003, he wrote to one of the many judges involved, “I normally would not address a letter to the judge in a pending legal proceeding…. However, my office has received over 27,000 emails reflecting understandable concern for the well-being of Terri Schiavo." A Times report published last weekend, about Jeb’s many notes and requests to the White House on other matters when his father worked there, suggests that he “normally” wasn’t shy at all about asserting influence inappropriately. At the very end, after the autopsy confirmed that Terri’s brain really was too damaged for the sort of consciousness that her parents imagined, Bush wrote to a state prosecutor asking him to investigate Michael Schiavo, suggesting that there had been a sinister gap between when Schiavo found his wife collapsed and when he called 911. “I urge you to take a fresh look at this case without any preconceptions as to the outcome,” Bush wrote. The prosecutor found nothing.
