Vice-President Richard Cheney suffered a major heart attack, sidelining George W. Bush's Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.combative second (or, as some said, first) in command for two months and forcing President Bush to reconsider his refusal of an offer Cheney had earlier made to drop off the 2004 Republican ticket.

Cheney had made the offer in recognition that he had become a highly polarizing figure whose presence on the ticket might hurt Bush's chances at the polls, perhaps enough to hand victory to the Democrats,but Bush, confident of victory and highly dependent on Cheney's advice, had said no.

Now the situation had changed.

On Oct. 23, in nationally televised press conference, with a visibly thinner Vice-President Cheney in attendance, Bush issued the following statement:

Bush's announcement touched off a scramble of speculation as to who Cheney's replacement would be. Mr. Bush himself did not seem to know the answer at first, but in January 2004 announced that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist would be taking Cheney's place on the ticket. Frist had assumed the leadership after Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott had been forced to step down in the wake of scandals including, at a celebration of Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday, an apparent retrospective endorsement of the Senator's 1948 third-party presidential run on a segregationist ticket.

Frist himself was not without controversy, having been accused, among other things, of questionable personal use of campaign funds. He had, however, been instrumental in shepherding a number of Bush initiatives through the Senate, and was considered a useful go-between in dealing with the GOP's religious right.

The Bush-Frist ticket would eke out a narrow victory over the Democratic ticket of Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards. In 2005, Vice-President Frist would personally intervene in the case of a Florida woman, Terri Schiavo, who had been diagnosed as being in a "persistent vegetative state" and whose husband Michael, beset by massive medical bills after caring for her since her illness began in 1990, had petitioned a court to allow the removal of the feeding tube keeping her alive, as permitted under Florida Statutes Section 765.401(3). Frist, a licensed physician, would insist that in his professional opinion Mrs. Schiavo was not irretrievably comatose and that therefore removing the tube would be illegal. The Vice-President's influence would prove crucial to overruling a Pinellas County court ruling authorizing the removal of the feeding tube. Mrs. Schiavo remains in her coma as of February 2011; her husband, having exhausted his personal resources and having received little support from his wife's family, who had insisted on keeping her on life support, has filed for bankruptcy. Mrs. Schiavo's care is currently being provided at federal expense under "Terri's Law," the Defense of Life in Medical Treatment Act, passed in September 2005; the opinion of her physicians, based on brain scans and other tests, is that she will never awaken. Several complaints have been filed against Frist with various medical ethics oversight organizations, but no action has been taken on any of them.