The Nine [137]
Souter said he was.
“You’re Justice Breyer, right?” said the man.
Rather than embarrass the fellow, Souter simply nodded and exchanged pleasantries, until he was asked an unexpected question.
“Justice Breyer, what’s the best thing about being on the Supreme Court?”
The justice thought for a while, then said, “Well, I’d have to say it’s the privilege of serving with David Souter.”
During the spring of 2005, when the justices looked for clues about Rehnquist’s prognosis, the most important event for the Court involved a case that was never accepted for review. The justices did not write a single opinion in the matter of Terri Schiavo, but no case that year had a greater impact on the Court as an institution.
By the beginning of 2005, Schiavo’s story was a familiar one in Florida, if not in the rest of the country. She became suddenly ill on February 25, 1990, and her heart briefly stopped beating, and she went into a deep coma. In 1998, her husband and guardian, Michael Schiavo, went to the state court in Florida, asking that her feeding tube be removed because she was in a persistent vegetative state. Michael said that based on conversations with his wife before she was stricken, he believed she would not have wanted to be kept alive in such circumstances. A judge agreed and ordered the tube removed, but Terri’s parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, argued that her condition was not so dire and that she might someday recover. Years of bitter court fights followed.
The struggle over Terri Schiavo was at once a terrible family quarrel and a proxy battle over abortion and the “right to life.” It was also, curiously, a recapitulation of the struggle in Bush v. Gore in Florida. Throughout the process, the more Democratic-leaning courts in the state found in Michael Schiavo’s favor, and the Republican-dominated state legislature, along with Governor Jeb Bush, took the parents’ side. In 2003, the state even passed a law authorizing Governor Bush to order Terri’s feeding tube to be reinserted—and the state supreme court, the same justices who had ruled twice in Gore’s favor, declared that law unconstitutional.
The final crisis in the case was set off when a Florida judge, George Greer, ruled on February 25, 2005, that he would permit no more stays and ordered the tube removed on March 18. In front of the hospice in Pinellas Park where Schiavo was being treated, a series of protests and prayer vigils began under the leadership of Rev. Patrick Mahoney, who was affiliated with a group called the Christian Defense Coalition. (Mahoney was a veteran of the antiabortion movement and many conservative causes; in 1994, he had persuaded Paula Jones to file her sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill Clinton.)
Schiavo’s feeding tube was removed on the afternoon of March 18. With their options in Florida exhausted and Terri likely to die in a few days, Schiavo’s parents turned to Washington, specifically to Tom DeLay, the majority leader in the House of Representatives. An ardent opponent of abortion rights and a fierce partisan known as the Hammer, DeLay engineered an extraordinary legislative feat with remarkable speed. Congress had gone into recess, but DeLay managed to gather a quorum of 218 representatives on Sunday, March 20, to pass a bill designed to prevent the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube; the Senate did, too. President Bush cut short a vacation at his Crawford, Texas, ranch to fly across the country to sign the bill, which he did at 1:08 a.m. on Monday, March