The Bush years

It’s long been known that wine tends to improve with age. The same seems to hold true of Americans’ perspectives on their former presidents.
Even the most disappointing presidents tend to undergo rehabilitation with time. They all seem to appear wiser, more capable, and more statesmanlike in the rear-view mirror. George W. Bush, for example, left office in 2009 with a 33-percent approval rating. Ten years later, he was viewed positively by two-thirds of Americans, according to polling and has probably only grown more popular since. His remarkable rehabilitation is far from justified.
What many Americans may not realize, is that we continue to live with the negative consequences of George W. Bush’s maladministration, as well as that of his father, H.W. Bush, to a degree that is unusual. It is time to re-litigate the Bush years, because they were particularly bad for America.
It was George W. Bush, after all, who sent thousands of American servicemen and women to their deaths or permanent injury in Iraq over lies about weapons of mass destruction, while allowing the architect of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, to remain free.
The human cost of Bush’s response to a terrorist attack that occurred on his watch is incalculable. The financial legacy of Bush’s self-declared Global War on Terrorism, however, can be calculated, and the cost is staggering. A 2021 analysis by the Cost of War Project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, calculated that the first 20 years of Bush’s war on terrorism had cost the U.S. $8 trillion, including war-related increases to the Pentagon’s base budget, care for veterans to date and in the future, Department of Homeland Security spending, and interest payments on all that deficit spending, which by itself constitutes nearly a quarter of America’s $34 trillion national debt.
And it gets worse. The Bush tax cuts, approved in 2001 and 2003, which went overwhelmingly to the wealthiest Americans, took a federal budget that was in surplus during President Bill Clinton’s second term and set the stage for the biggest run-up in the national debt in the nation’s history. An analysis by the Center for American Progress found that the Bush tax cuts had added another $8 trillion to the nation’s debt as of last year, and that number increases by close to $400 billion each year since the cuts were made permanent. Between Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his tax cuts, his policies are directly responsible for just under half of our national debt. Add in the $8 trillion added under President Trump and these two GOP presidents have accounted for three-quarters of our nation’s debt. That’s a legacy that will make life significantly poorer for future generations.
And writing of legacies, George H.W. Bush’s can be seen in the rapidly diminishing respect for the U.S. Supreme Court. While President Donald Trump has received plenty of criticism for his three Supreme Court picks, all of whom are well outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence, the two most clearly partisan and arguably corrupt members of the high court, Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, were both nominees of the elder Bush.
For more than 30 years, Thomas has brought his insecurities, grudges, conflicts of interest, and intellectual mediocrity to the high court. Alito, similarly, most recently made the news over the flying of flags at his homes suggesting sympathy with the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. Nonetheless, he announced in a recent letter to Congress that he would not recuse himself from cases related to the 2021 attack on the Capitol. That’s despite federal law that requires judges to recuse themselves for even the appearance of a conflict of interest or bias in a case.
Both Alito and Thomas have garnered additional headlines over the past year as financial gifts, of things like travel and luxury motor homes, have finally been exposed. None of these gifts, in many cases from individuals with regular business or strong interest in matters before the court, were reported at the time on required financial disclosures. This is simple, rank corruption and it has, rightfully, taken a toll on the reputation of the Roberts’ court.
Both Alito and Thomas are known for their frequent partisan speeches (something judges are supposed to avoid) and for regularly undermining voting rights, civil rights, abortion rights, and their own credibility through written decisions that frequently offer up tortured legal justifications for what are plainly partisan political opinions, rather than principal or law.
It goes to show that it really does matter who we elect as president and the consequences can be both far-reaching and long-lasting. Let’s not let the fog of time leave us blind to the reality of that fact.