Wild Bill, Dead At Last

[womzilla]

There were worse people than William Rehnquist. Few of them have had such a long run of substantial power over the course of the United States, starting with his work as a poll watcher in Arizona, disenfranchising blacks by administering literacy tests; through his perjury during his Supreme Court nomination hearings, slandering the name of Justice Robert Jackson with lies of race hatred; through his signed concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore, in which he made it clear that his love for democracy began and ended with allowing the vote among people who agreed with him.

I'm sure he loved his wife and children, but that's more in the category of "minimal qualification for humanity" than anything actually admirable. He liked Gilbert and Sullivan and had a small flare for the silly.

He should be ground into dust and scattered in the cold North Sea. It's better than he deserves, because we deserved better than him.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Bush is faced with one of the most difficult tasks of his term in office: finding someone worse than "that clown Renchburg."

Bork

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

He managed ith Bork but the Senate had a temporary fit of sanity

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they've got some prime wingnuts prepped and ready in the wings for just this eventuality.

They may not be able to shoot straight while doing anything else, but these bastards been focused on the logistics of consolidating power for the last 30+ years.

The Law Is the Embodiment of Everything That's Excellent

[(Anonymous)]

...but Rehnquist, my Senators, no longer embodies the Law.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and all that, but when I heard the news on Sunday morning on FUV, I couldn't help feeling a little pleased that Renchburg had just missed joining the exclusive club to which the two greater Williams he served with (Douglas, until 1975, and Brennan, until 1990) belonged, missing the thirty-four-year mark by three months. True, this puts him in the same company as one of the greatest Justices -- Joseph Story -- but leaves him short of John Marshall, John Marshall Harlan (whose grandson, coincidentally, he succeeded on the bench), Stephen Field and the aforementioend Douglas and Brennan.

The interesting thing here is that Bush pushed up Roberts. We haven't had a Chief Justice nominee under fifty since John Marshall (the last three were all sixty-two or close to it); the only one under sixty in the last century was Fred Vinson (fifty-six). My theory is that Bush has decided to channel William Howard Taft, who had no sooner seen Charles Evans Hughes confirmed as an Associate Justice in 1910 than the Chief Justiceship became vacant. Taft was apparently considering naming Hughes, but felt that he couldn't do it so soon after Hughes had joined the bench. (It was Taft who was the first to move an Associate Justice to the center seat with Edward D. White. Roosevelt followed the example with Harlan Stone in 1941, while Reagan elevated Rehnquist in 1986. Alas, Johnson couldn't do it with Abe Fortas in 1968.)

Hughes did become Chief Justice in 1930 (succeeding Taft), after having lost the Presidency in 1916 and serving as Secretary of State under Harding and Coolidge. He's considered one of the greatest Chief Justices, but I've always thought him overrated: his greatness apparently lies in the way he helped stave off the Judicial Reform bill of 1937 with the "switch in time that saves nine." (Owen J. Roberts -- no relation to John that I know of -- bears that tag mostly, but Hughes's own voting record with New Deal legislation is worth studying. He wasn't as consistently for it as were Brandeis, Stone and Cardozo, but when he voted against it, he never wrote the majority opinion. FDR thought Hughes -- a fellow former Governor of New York -- the best politician in Washington.)

If we can get a Charles Evans Hughes in 2005, though, I'll be content; however, cynic that I am, I suspect it'll prove to be someone a lot more like Warren Earl Burger...or William Hubbes Rehnquist.

Oy vey, oy vey, as they do not say in the Supreme Court.