Last week, Republican Jeb Bush announced that his looming 2016 presidential bid is closer to becoming reality. Naturally, then, the activist nonpartisan journalists at ThinkProgress immediately set out to find out how Michael Schiavo feels about Bush’s candidacy.
Remember Schiavo? He’s the guy who spent years trying to get a court order to starve his wife to death beginning in the late 1990s.
Schiavo’s wife, Theresa Marie “Terri” Schiavo, had been living for several years in a “persistent vegetative state.” Doctors used feeding tubes to provide her liquid and nutrients.
Terri Schiavo’s parents wanted their daughter to continue living. In court, they noted that their daughter was a practicing Catholic who agreed with the Catholic Church’s stance against euthanasia.
However, Michael Schiavo, Terri’s legal guardian, hired a lawyer famous for winning right-to-die cases to convince a judge to allow Terri to starve death.
A decade after Terri’s ultimate death, ThinkProgress is now astonished that Bush, who was involved as governor of Florida in the prolonged battle over Terri Schiavo’s fate at various points, has not mentioned her during his presidential exploration.
Michael Schiavo told ThinkProgress that he doesn’t support Bush’s prospective candidacy.
“If you want a government that’s gonna intrude on your life, enforce their personal views on you, then I guess Jeb Bush is your man,” Schiavo declared.
“We really don’t need another Bush in office,” he added.
George Felos, Schiavo’s attorney of right-to-die fame, told the big-government-loving journalists at ThinkProgress that Bush’s actions to prolong Terri Schaivo’s life were “an egregious example of the fat hand of government inserting itself into a family’s medical decision and the obtrusive hand of government trying to override their decision.”
In a pun of world-historically horrific taste, Felos also charged that Bush “manipulated the organs of state government in order to try to evade” a 2002 court order to starve Terri Schiavo to death.
Pinellas County Judge George Greer ordered the final removal of feeding tubes from Terri Schiavo’s body at 1 p.m. on March 18, 2005.
After 14 days with no food or hydration, she finally starved to death in Pinellas Park, Fla. on March 31, 2005.
In December 2005, Michael Schiavo started a short-lived political action committee, TerriPAC, that favored the right to die. Two years later, after being fined $1,350 by the Federal Election Commission for shoddy recordkeeping, TerriPAC shut its door.
Schiavo married his live-in girlfriend in 2006.
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