Why Jeb Wouldn’t Pull The Plug On Terri Schiavo -- By Eleanor Clift

It may or may not end up mattering politically, but did Jeb do the right thing on Terri Schiavo? The judge who crossed him says: sort of.

It is almost a decade since a banner flew over a Florida hospice from a small aircraft taunting, “Who’s Gov? Bush or Greer?” Inside the normally secluded facility was 41-year-old Terri Schiavo, unaware and uncomprehending, the center of a battle between then-Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Judge George Greer, who had ordered Schiavo’s feeding tube removed and had repeatedly rebuffed Bush’s attempts to have it reinstated.

Judge Greer, now retired, rarely talks to reporters, but when I reached him on the phone to get his perspective on the events surrounding Schiavo’s death on March 31, 2005, and what those events might tell us about Bush as a possible president, he didn’t immediately hang up, and he was more supportive of Bush than I expected. He separated Bush from the “religious right” protestors, even though Bush sided with them and suggested in an emotional press conference that he could use his executive power to have the state police remove Schiavo from the hospice and take her to a hospital.

“I was a very conservative Republican, a Southern Baptist,” Greer told The Daily Beast. “And I was thrown under the bus by those people.” His pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Clearwater asked him to leave the church. There were death threats and dead flowers delivered to his wife with the note, “no food, no water.”

Bush was a hero to the right at first, but then he backed away from his threat to apply the full weight of the state to keep Schiavo alive. “In the showdown over Terri, Judge Greer didn’t blink; Governor Bush did,” Rev. Patrick Mahoney, who led the protests, told me at the time.

When I told Greer that I thought Bush got the worst of both worlds with the activists turning on him and the secularists, if that’s the right word, thinking he overreached in the service of the religious right, he agreed that it was “probably fair to say….Bush is a moderate,” Greer said. What every moderate learns when dealing with activists on the right (or the left) is that it’s never enough. If the Schiavo experience informs Bush as he navigates the nominating process of a party energized by its farthest right wing, it’s that a line has to be drawn somewhere.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/05/why-jeb-wouldn-t-pull-the-plug-on-terri-schiavo.html

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Bush's damage control team is hard at work!