William Rehnquist: Key figure in Washington’s rightward trajectory

[Karmadillo]

Well, if you listen to TV, you would think Rehnquist was, at the least, a minor saint. Here's an article at odds with this view, although it's written by a socialist, so it must not be true because the US media always tells the truth.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/rehn-s05.shtml

William H. Rehnquist, a member of the US Supreme Court since 1972 and chief justice since 1986, died at his Arlington, Virginia, home Saturday night, eleven months after being diagnosed with thyroid cancer. During his 33 years on the Supreme Court, Rehnquist played a key role in rolling back the limited political and judicial reforms which accompanied the post-World War II economic boom and solidifying the right wing’s grip on all three branches of the federal government.

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In 1952, while a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, he wrote that the infamous “separate but equal” doctrine announced by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1892), which sanctioned Jim Crow segregation in the American South, “was right and should be affirmed.” Two years later, however, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown v. the Board of Education that governmental-sponsored racial discrimination violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

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With control of the court as chief justice and the support of right-wing associate justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who was appointed by the elder George Bush and confirmed in 1991, Rehnquist succeeded in achieving many of his goals, including gutting federal workers’ protections and civil rights legislation under the guise of states’ rights, limiting environmental protections by constricting Congressional power under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, and rolling back the right to counsel and other important liberties of people accused of crimes.

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Rehnquist consistently attacked the foundations of US democracy. He called Thomas Jefferson’s claim that the First Amendment stood as “a wall of separation between church and state” a “misguided metaphor based on bad history.” In 2002, Rehnquist “took a pile driver to that wall of separation,” as the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time, authoring the majority opinion upholding the use of government vouchers to fund parochial school tuitions. (See “US Supreme Court authorizes school vouchers: a simultaneous assault on freedom of thought and public education”).

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Perhaps even more critical in the long run than his legacy of reactionary legal decisions, Rehnquist played a decisive role in the Republican right’s destabilization campaign against the Clinton administration, and then in subverting the 2000 presidential election and stealing it for Bush.

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[fasttense]

1. I'll never forgive him for selecting a president for us. n/t

[1932]

2. and he died clean, dry, in his own home, with dignity.

[Karmadillo]

3. CNN: Supreme Court Justices are entitled to four clerks. Rehnquist wanted

only three because he valued the resulting intimacy. Four's a crowd, three's an intimate gathering? We're about two hours away from receiving proof of his first miracle.