Mr. Bush\u2019s always controversial presidency left behind a changed nation and a changed world. Taking office in 2001 after a disputed election settled only by a 5-4 decision by a bitterly divided Supreme Court, and decisively reelected in 2004, President Bush led the United States into four wars, oversaw the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare, and enforced a drastic shrinking of elementary, secondary, and collegiate education.<\/p>\n
He spearheaded the transformation of President Bill Clinton\u2019s budget surpluses of 1999 and 2000 into permanent deficits of more than a trillion dollars a year, thus profoundly reducing the amount of capital available to address the needs of the vast majority of citizens and inhibiting the creation of new jobs with any promise of advancement or financial security, while at the same time pursuing tax reductions that increased the differences between the income and assets of, in his own terminology, \u201cowners\u201d and \u201cpre-owners\u201d of \u201cthe American ownership society\u201d to extremes almost beyond measure.<\/p>\n
When he left office, taxation of personal and corporate incomes, while still legally extant, had been effectively replaced by a new payroll tax, so that almost all investment, inheritance, and interest income was left tax-free. \u201cThose with the greatest stake in America,\u201d President Bush often said throughout his second term, \u201chave the greatest stake in defending it. Thus we as a nation must do all that we can to ensure that the commitment of those with the greatest stake to the rest of us, a commitment on which our freedom and security rests, only grows greater.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adding to Mr. Bush\u2019s statutory and administrative economic policies were a series of decisions by the \u201cBush Court,\u201d as the Supreme Court was known after 2005, when in that year Mr. Bush replaced three retiring members with very conservative justices (a fourth was replaced in 2006), depriving government regulation of corporations and the environment of any legal basis\u2014decisions which many analysts considered more significant than the repudiation by the Bush Court of previous decisions upholding a woman\u2019s right to privacy in the matter of abortion and certain applications of affirmative action. Even with the Bush Court seated, however, the Republican-controlled Congress that Mr. Bush enjoyed throughout his presidency repeatedly passed legislation removing issue after issue from the purview of the state and federal courts, including questions of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to assemble, and the right to trial by jury. Despite these prohibitions of judicial review, the government, under Mr. Bush, did not press for any legislation curtailing what had previously been referred to as \u201cFirst Amendment freedoms,\u201d but simply refrained from challenging such legislation passed by many states, rather filing supportive briefs before the Supreme Court when such measures were contested. Ultimately the reversal of the series of 20th-century Supreme Court decisions subjecting the states to the Bill of Rights, long-sought by certain conservatives, was achieved not\u00a0de jure<\/em>\u00a0but\u00a0de facto<\/em>. \u201cThe press is legally free,\u201d the former\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0columnist Frank Rich put it in 2007, writing in his online journal Thatsrichbrother.com. \u201cIt merely refrains from practicing freedom.\u201d Some said the same of the nation as a whole; others said the country was freer than it had ever been.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mr. Bush\u2019s always controversial presidency left behind a changed nation and a changed world. Taking office in 2001 after a disputed election settled only by a 5-4 decision by a … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6192,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/addnews.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6191"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/addnews.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/addnews.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/addnews.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/addnews.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/addnews.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6193,"href":"https:\/\/addnews.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6191\/revisions\/6193"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/addnews.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/addnews.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/addnews.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/addnews.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}