How Will Jeb Bush Handle the 'Catholic Question'?

[Mark]

How Will Jeb Bush Handle the 'Catholic Question' on the Campaign Trail?

A new poll shows the former governor of Florida, brother of President Bush 43 and son of President Bush 41, leading the field of potential 2016 Republican presidential candidates. The poll comes just as Pope Francis is moving assertively, and some might say clumsily, on the public policy front, inspiring the deal between Havana and Washington to renew full diplomatic relations and preparing a papal encyclical on climate change.

Over the weekend, one of the shrewdest editors in American journalism, Matt Drudge, was linking to a Breitbart rewrite of a 2013 Miami Herald story. The Breitbart and Drudge headlines were about Jeb Bush’s admiration for the legislative tactics of President Lyndon Johnson, but the stories also carried Bush’s comments linking Bush’s position on the immigration issue to the teaching of his own Catholic Church. In his 2013 speech at Saint Leo University, Bush said, according to the Herald’s account, “To me ­— and I’m here at this great Catholic institution and this is what my church teaches me — it is completely un-American to require people living in the shadows.”

Anyone worried that Pope Francis’s outspoken liberalism will sway Bush away from conservative principles may be reassured by the former Florida governor’s statement reacting to President Obama’s renewal of full diplomatic relations with Cuba. Bush denounced the deal as “ill-advised,” a “foreign-policy misstep” that “undermines America’s credibility and undermines the quest for a free and democratic Cuba.” The statement was framed as a criticism of President Obama, but implicit in it was a distancing from the foreign policy of Pope Francis.

Bush is hardly the only potential 2016 presidential candidate who may face questions about Pope Francis. Other Catholic Republicans include a former senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum; a senator from Florida, Marco Rubio; the party’s 2012 vice presidential nominee, Paul Ryan, and the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie. On the Democratic side, Andrew Cuomo and Vice President Biden are both Catholics.

As the candidates and the campaigns formulate their responses to questions from the public and the press about the pope, they’ll want to look to three places.

The first place is the Constitution, which in its text — not even in an amendment, but right there in Article VI — says that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” That’s been read, correctly, in my view, as an emphatic suggestion that voters select officeholders using criteria other than a candidate’s religious beliefs or practices.

The second place is history, and in particular to the tale of our only Catholic president, John Kennedy, surmounting anti-Catholic bigotry to win the Democratic nomination and the general election in 1960. Harry Truman’s reported quip about John Kennedy and Ambassador Joseph Kennedy — “It’s not the pope I’m afraid of, it’s the pop” — may resonate with Republican voters who haven’t forgiven Jeb Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, for raising income-tax rates.

The third place to seek guidance on these matters is conscience. For most modern American adults, religion is a matter not of blind obedience but of independent choice — choice of the sort that Jeb Bush himself made in becoming a Catholic as an adult. Religion may inform politics on general matters such as human dignity or even on specifics such as immigration or support for vouchers that would allow students to escape public schools to attend parochial schools. But it won’t always dictate a politician’s decisions on issues such as Cuba or climate change, where a Vatican view might conflict either with political reality or with a candidate’s sincerely held ideology or longstanding policy positions.

If Jeb Bush manages to articulate this third point in a way that makes sense, it may even attract some voters who see how it can apply beyond religion, to other institutions and leaders that deserve respect but also the skepticism of independent thinking. Like, say, the political parties and their platforms themselves, which in certain circles approach their own quasi-religious status. It may seem like wishful thinking, but if there were ever a time for that, it’s now — the campaign is just getting under way.


http://reason.com/archives/2014/12/29/how-will-jeb-bush-handle-the-catholic-qu

[Mark]

Jeb Bush, in Clear Nod to 2016, Quits All Corporate Positions

Jeb Bush has quit his $60,000-a-year position as adviser to an online educational company, and his office told The Washington Post late Wednesday that he had stepped down from all of his corporate and business posts "effective today."

It is the latest in a series of moves that point to the likelihood that the former Florida governor plans to seek the GOP nomination to run for president in 2016.

The surprisingly fast and bold move — Bush is now more committed to running than the presumed Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton — will force his fellow Republicans to declare earlier than many of them had been prepared to do. Bush's entry stands to suck up most of the fundraising by wary GOP donors who want to get behind someone who will do well in a general election, not just the Republican primaries.

Already, though, conservatives like anti-tax hawk Grover Norquist are making moves to take on Bush.

Norquist is targeting Bush in a strategy that attempts to link him to what opponents used to help bring down his father's presidency — tax hikes, Fox News reported Thursday.

Bush is one of a very few likely GOP presidential candidates who have refused to sign Norquist's "no new taxes" pledge. Those who have signed include Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

"Jeb Bush won't put it in writing, and he won't say it," Norquist told Fox News. "I think at some point you need to ask Jeb Bush what taxes do you plan to raise."

"You know what Jeb Bush is? He's an old-time liberal Republican. That's what he is," influential conservative radio talk show host Mark Levin said on a recent show, according to Fox.

Fox also quoted one of Florida's leading political analysts in pointing out that many Bush supporters consider themselves stalwart conservatives.

"I think that is kind of nonsense," Florida International University political scientist Dario Moreno told Fox News in response to Norquist's accusation.

Moreno told Fox that the term "Jeb Bush Republican" refers to anyone with unquestioned conservative credentials.

"Jeb's record in Florida was as very much a tax cutter and as a fiscal conservative. He got rid of Florida corporate tax and he reduced Florida intangible tax, which is a tax on investment," Moreno said.

The New Year's Eve announcement to the Post came on a day when Bush also declined an invitation to speak at this month's Iowa Freedom Summit, a political event organized by one of Congress' most strident immigration critics and which most other likely Republican presidential contenders plan to attend.

He also wrapped up 2014 with a $10,000 donation to a fund to aid the families of the two New York City police officers killed by a gunman on Dec. 20.

Bush on Dec. 16 announced he was laying the foundation for a White House run, and in recent days has been ending business and professional affiliations, including some that could prove politically compromising.

Shedding his private-sector work is "part and parcel of a process he is going through as he transitions to focus on a potential run for president," his spokeswoman, Kristy Campbell, told The Post.

"This is a natural next step that will allow him to focus his time on gauging interest for a potential run."

He recently ended a consulting deal with Barclays, the British investment-banking conglomerate, that paid him more than $1 million a year, according to reports.

The Post also reported that recent filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Bush was leaving the boards of two publicly traded firms: Rayonier, which invests in forest lands, and Tenet Healthcare, which backed and profited from President Barack Obama's health insurance reform program.

The scion of one of America's most prominent political families, Jeb Bush is the son of one former U.S. president, George H. W. Bush, and brother to another, George W. Bush.

Bush's team said he had declined an invitation to speak at the Freedom Summit, a political event organized by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, a strident immigration critic. An aide cited a scheduling conflict, although Bush is one of the few high-profile presidential contenders not attending the Jan. 24 summit.
Bush is one of the GOP's most vocal advocates for comprehensive immigration reform.

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.Newsmax.com/Newsfront/jeb-bush-corporate-board/2014/12/31/id/615917/#ixzz3NfXDKxTw

[Psalm 51:17]

Christie is a Roman Catholic?

And remember Piers Morgan is a Roman Catholic.

You see how they're craftily working both sides of the fence.

[Mark]

5 faith facts about Jeb Bush: Catholicism ‘resonated with me’

Like his Republican brethren, Catholic convert Jeb Bush, 62, is chasing the white evangelical vote in the pre-primary heats of the 2016 presidential race. Bush says he will officially announce his candidacy Monday (June 15). But with his sinking poll numbers — and plenty of Catholic and evangelical competition, too — he has a fight ahead.

Here are five faith facts about the third Bush to look toward the Oval Office.

1. Like many Americans, he comes from a religiously mixed family.

His great-grandfather was a Catholic . His father, George H.W. Bush, was raised Episcopalian, and mother, Barbara, grew up Presbyterian. His brother George W. is an evangelical who drew voters with his narrative about giving up his partying ways after a talk with Billy Graham. Jeb Bush married his wife, Columba, a Catholic, at the University of Texas’ Catholic student center when he was just 21 years old in 1974.

He joined the Catholic Church in a ceremony at the Easter vigil in 1995, finding wisdom and solace in it a year after a brutal campaign and humbling defeat in his first run to be Florida’s governor, according to The Washington Post. This winter, Bush told a New York Times reporter, “I loved the absolute nature of the Catholic Church. It resonated with me.”

2. Faith infuses his governing choices.

Jeb Bush has long been more overt than his father or brother were about campaigning and governing on a religion-based moral agenda. “It’s not an imposition of faith. It’s who you are,” he told The Florida Catholic in 2007.

Whether he’s talking about the unborn or the terminally ill, Bush told Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, his “deeply held belief” is that “the most vulnerable in our society need to be protected. They need to have legal rights. And as a society, we need to recognize their value and their worth.”

As Florida governor, he pushed laws to limit abortion and he offered state funding to crisis pregnancy centers that counseled against it, he told Daly in an April 13 radio interview. Bush tried unsuccessfully to block the effort by Terri Schiavo’s husband to disconnect the artificial food and hydration that kept his irreparably brain-damaged wife alive. Bush also opposes physician-assisted dying, now legal in five states.

3. But he’s not 100 percent in line with Catholic teaching on all points.

Bush is in accord with the Catholic bishops on pushing for immigration reform, according to The New York Times, which tracked Bush to his Coral Gables, Fla., church one Sunday in March and photographed him passing the peace.

But he doesn’t heed Catholic teaching on one matter of life and death. Like 59 percent of white Catholics in a Pew Research Center survey,  he supports the death penalty. Florida executed 21 prisoners during his two terms as governor, 1999-2007, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

4) The ‘warp speed’ of social change mystifies Bush.

He is uneasy as a Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage looms. He told Christian Broadcasting Network chief political correspondent David Brody he could not fathom the “warp speed” of changing public views on this. “Irrespective of the Supreme Court ruling … we need to be stalwart supporters of traditional marriage.”

 5) He’s kissed the evangelical ring.

A radio host in Iowa told the Washington Examiner: Voters there are “not necessarily looking for the nice guy, or the guy who says ‘Jesus’ the most.” They want a conservative champion of religious freedom.”

And that’s the bell Bush rang in his commencement speech at Liberty University, the conservative college in Lynchburg, Va., founded by Jerry Falwell.

Bush accused liberals of seeking to undermine religious freedom. According to Reuters, he said “fashionable opinion” has a problem with Christians and the only proper response is “a forthright defense” of the constitutional right to freedom of religion.

“Federal authorities are demanding obedience, in complete disregard of religious conscience,” he said. “In a free society, the answer is no.”

http://www.religionnews.com/2015/06/12/5-faith-facts-jeb-bush-catholicism-resonated/