Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,698

This is the grave of William Rehnquist.

Huh, well here’s a person I do not like. There’s a lot to say, more than I have time for, so I will keep this relatively brief and then you all can talk about how the world was worse for this man’s life in comments.

Born in 1924 in Milwaukee, Rehnquist grew up there. He went into the Army Air Force in 1943 and stayed there through the rest of the war, leaving in 1946. Then it was onto Stanford, where he majored in political science. He went to Harvard for a master’s degree and then back to Stanford Law. While there, he met a fellow student named Sandra Day. They dated for awhile and then would find each other again in their common goal of making the nation worse many years later. He clerked for a term with Robert Jackson on the Supreme Court, but evidently learned nothing about how to be a decent person from him. Rehnquist started a practice in Phoenix, got to know Barry Goldwater and that was a human for ol’Bill. Rehnquist hated desegregation and engaged in voter suppression tactics as a lawyer. Shocking that Arizona was the one non-southern state that required pre-clearance in the Voting Rights Act! He was a legal adviser to Goldwater when the latter to his extremism to the top of the Republican ticket in 1964. Voters rejected that vision overwhelmingly; too bad they haven’t continued to reject extremism at the top of the GOP!

Richard Nixon would find Rehnquist more than useful. He appointed him as an assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel. The big thing Rehnquist did there was work to get Abe Fortas to resign from the Supreme Court for corruption. I mean, Fortas needed to go, not questioning that but it’s pretty rich coming from the kind of people Bill here would promote and work with later in his career, such as good ol’ clean-handed Clarence Thomas. Then Nixon sent him to the Supreme Court, where he moved the entire institution well to the right. During the Senate hearings, Rehnquist totally committed perjury in denying his work in voter suppression, but we know he was lying. We also know he openly opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, believing, like people such as Rand Paul today, that if a business wants to deny service to customers of color, it totally should have the right to do so. After all, freedom of association baby!

But Democrats couldn’t stop this nomination, even though they did stop other Nixon attempts to nominate some of America’s worst people to the Court. The Court’s aging liberals were horrified by Rehnquist’s ideas, though they liked him personally. Thurgood Marshall and William O. Douglas routinely lambasted Rehnquist’s opinions, but as I have stated before, there is nothing more meaningless yet beloved by liberals more than a good Supreme Court dissent. For example, in Jefferson v. Hackney, a 1972 case that repealed part of a Texas welfare plan around Aid to Families with Dependent Children (hard to imagine Texas even implementing a welfare program today), they noted in dissents that Rehnquist was completely lying about the history of welfare and other things about AFDC because he wanted to get a conservative result. Of course he was! This is what conservatives do. Then liberals say, as they do today with the Supreme Court’s 3 liberals, “well, at least that was a ringing dissent!!!” But it doesn’t matter! Rehnquist, like the later Fox News Grandpa Sam Alito does today, probably responding by using the Constitution as toilet paper.

Then in 1986, Ronald Reagan decided that Rehnquist as Associate Justice wasn’t good enough. Nope, needed to make this guy Chief Justice when Warren Burger retired. The Senate confirmed as well, which then meant a lovely addition to the court named Antonin Scalia. Luckily, no one was too concerned with the voting rights issues now, not with Strom Thurmond guiding the nomination through the Senate! Now, because Rehnquist was a good ol’boy, he was actually personally popular on the Court, that long-time bastion of Beltway chumminess. Who doesn’t miss the days when Scalia could launch an opinion to destroy democracy and then Ruth Bader Ginsburg would join him for some nice opera that evening! So there was no real effort by the other justices to say that maybe we need someone else as the head honcho. But some Democrats did try. Ted Kennedy led what fight there was, noting that Rehnquist for eight years owned an Arizona home that had a restrictive covenant on it, meaning he legally could not sell it to non-whites. Howard Metzenbaum called him out on his lies back in 1971. Rehnquist was openly hostile to them.

But hey, what could go wrong! Rehnquist was such a super guy. Sandy Day O’Connor made sure everyone knew that about her old beau after she got to serve on the Court with him. Meanwhile, there were the many terrible decisions and opinions and sometimes dissents when he didn’t get his way. He and O’Connor may have been old sweethearts, but since she voted against evil in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he got to rant about the evils of abortion from a losing position for once. He had hated Roe v. Wade as well, of course. But usually he won. There was his opinion in U.S. v, Lopez, the 1995 case that voided the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 based on spurious Commerce Clause grounds that really covered up the fact that the right-wingers wanted more guns. Glad that Rehnquist doesn’t hold some responsibility for thousands of dead kids in decades since this case! This was also the first case against the use of the Commerce Clause since 1937 and this has become far more common as conservatives today attempt to repeal the 20th century, a program Rehnquist would have been totally on board with. He continued that project with U.S. v. Morrison, overturning parts of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act of similar grounds. Funny how conservatives get so excited to overturn laws protecting children and women from violence….

Oh, and of course we can’t forget Bush v. Gore. It’s hardly surprising that Rehnquist was a complete partisan hack here. In fact, he hardly really gets criticized for his role in the judicial semi-coup to install George W. Bush on the throne. O’Connor gets a lot more of the criticism here, for the reason that people had higher expectation of her. Everyone knew that Rehnquist didn’t care about democracy or legitimacy. He had proved that for decades by this time!

Rehnquist was one of these justices who just refused to retire, no matter his health. He just wasn’t going to do it. By 2004, he had been diagnosed with cancer. He was missing arguments all the time. He did show up to administer the oath of office to George W. Bush for his second term in 2005 but openly taunted reporters who asked him about his plans. His plans were to die in office and that’s what he did later in 2005. He was 80 years old. Bush then named a lovely human named John Roberts to replace him. America has just been dandy ever since……

We have barely even touched upon the horrors that William Rehnquist launched on the nation, but this post is long enough, so we can leave it to comments. Have fun with some of his other decisions! The Supreme Court may be strangling American democracy like a demented anaconda, but at least we can talk here about how much Rehnquist sucks.

William Rehnquist is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other Chief Justices, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. As you can see, I have such respect for this august and lovely institution. Fred Vinson is in Louisa, Kentucky and Morrison Waite is in Toledo, Ohio. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.