Chief Justice Rehnquist Dies at 80

After 33 years at the bench, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist has passed away at the age of 80 due to thyroid cancer. This comes after the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor from the court over the summer. Rehnquist's passing gives President Bush the opportunity to replace the second justice of his term, this time perhaps to assume the highest role in the judicial system.

Comments

Obvious issues...

[RyanFenton]

Clinton got his two nominees, looks like Bush will get his two also.

Just hope this won't immediatly swing the issues of legal abortion and religious coersion too far to the right when all is said and done. Right wing judges aren't insane, but they are at least as activist on their core issues.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Obvious issues...

[AaronW]

One other thing to remember is that Clinton ran his choices before the republicans before he nominated them before the republicans came to power in the 1994 election. That's why in 1993 the judiciary committee voted unanimously to accept Ruth Bader Ginsburg and unanimously voted for Stephen Breyer in 1994 when democrats were still in charge. He made a real effort to work with them. For Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the senate voted 96 to 3 in favor. For Stephen Breyer was confirmed 89 to 9. Bush, on the other hand, has done everything within his power to totally ignore the democrats or even antagonize them. See http://hnn.us/articles/13357.html for a history of Clinton's appointees.

A Rehnquist Story

[fm6]

Way back in 1972, when he was first appointed to the court, Rehnquist was one of its most conservative Justices. He quickly became close friends with William O. Douglas, who was far and away the most liberal Justice. The friendship was obviously motivated in part by a mutual need to bridge their ideological gap so they could work together to make law that people on both sides could live with.

Nowadays, Washington is dominated by a self-righteous Us-And-Them mentality that makes such friendships impossible. The Supreme Court is sort of resistant to this, but is still pretty bad. And we're all suffering for it.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:How Important is a Chief Justice?

[ctr2sprt]

The WSJ's obit on Rehnquist had some interesting points on this. Early in his (pre-Chief) SCOTUS career, he had a tendency to write scathing dissents that nobody else would sign. Once he became Chief Justice, though, this mostly stopped. The obvious explanation is that he realized he had to work with his fellow justices and so decided to temper his dissents a little, in the spirit of compromise.

But one interesting thing about the CJ position is that he gets to decide who writes the opinions. The WSJ cited several examples of where Rehnquist unexpectedly did an about face and voted for stuff everyone was expecting him to vote against. The tinfoil-hat theory is that he did this because he knew he was going to lose (like 7-2 votes) but he wanted to "limit the damage." So he would side with the winners, then elect himself to write the majority opinion. He would make a legitimate assent, the theory goes, but he would carefully limit it. One of the examples was the Miranda case. Everyone expected him to vote against it, but he didn't. Instead, he wrote the opinion and basically just said "Miranda stands as is," when many of the majority justices actually wanted to expand it.

So if the WSJ's depiction is accurate, the CJ is pretty important. He can't make policy, but he can guide it. I'm sure there are also lots of procedural advantages that are mostly invisible to outsiders, like maybe he gets to decide who talks first in deliberations or something.