Jeb Bush in a change of heart

"Since before Christmas, [Governor Jeb] Bush has received appeals from state lawmakers and friends of the foster parents to get involved in the case, but Bush said the judiciary has the legal authority in the case and the governor cannot intervene."

I guess this is part of the reason for the big public relations push. Evidently the Scotts and their team of publicists believe they can somehow stampede the governor and legislature into passing a private bill for their personal benefit, much as was done a year or so ago for the parents of Terri Schiavo who also had suffered a string of court losses. Of course, the Schiavo private legislation has been ruled unconstitutional but the parents continue to file all kinds of silly motions in order to delay the inevitable.

One can certainly hope that Governor Bush has learned a lesson from the unfortunately Schiavo case. In that case, as in this one, the dispute had been thoroughly litigated by a number of courts with all of the decisions supporting one side but with the losing side attempting to resort to slanted publicity to get something from the legislature that they couldn't get legitimately from the courts.

Of course, the most famous case of getting private bills was that of Elizabeth Morgan, a plastic surgeon in the Washington, D.C. area who had such a powerful team of publicists working for her that she was able to get two private bills passed by the U.S. Congress. Amazing! Also, while incarcerated by a District of Columbia judge for contempt (ultimately overridden by the first of the private bills), she was dating a Federal appeals court judge who, as I recall, was permitted to make conjugal visits.