Tag Archives: rehnquist

Justice Stevens

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Imagining America if George Bush Chose the Supreme Court

I’d guess that the justices most likely to retire in the next four years would be Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O’Connor, and perhaps Justice Stevens.

Here are the general leanings of the current court members:

conservative — Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas

swing voters — O’Connor, Kennedy

liberal — Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer

Clearly, the biggest blow to social liberals would be the loss of Justice Stevens. A Rehnquist retirement wouldn’t change the court that much; an O’Connor retirement would. But the loss of Justice Stevens would be the biggest deal. You don’t hear much about him. He’s currently the oldest justice, at age 84 (he was appointed by Ford in 1975). However, I’ve read that he’s as mentally sharp as ever, and as one of the most liberal of the liberals, I’m sure he wouldn’t want Bush to name his replacement. He’d die on the bench first. (Which I sure hope doesn’t happen.)

If Bush wins, I fervently hope that the Democrats retake the Senate in 2006, if they don’t do so this year.

Thoroughgood

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Thoroughgood

“He said little during the argument sessions, growling occasionally at lawyers who were struggling lamely through their arguments and sometimes training his sarcasm on his own colleagues. During a death penalty argument in 1981, William H. Rehnquist, then an Associate Justice, suggested that the inmate’s repeated appeals had cost the taxpayers too much money. Justice Marshall interrupted, saying, “It would have been cheaper to shoot him right after he was arrested, wouldn’t it?”

Today would have been former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s 93rd birthday. You don’t often hear someone referred to as “a great American” anymore, but he was one; you can read his obituary on the New York Times Learning Network. (I don’t think this part of the website requires registration.)

Every day the New York Times website reprints the obituary of a famous person who was born on that day. There’s a link to it in a gray box entitled “On This Day” about halfway down the page. If you read me regularly, you know that I’m a New York Times junkie, but the paper really does know how to do a good obituary. (Not to get too morbid for you on a Monday morning.) I also did some random clicking and found this online guide to the Old Gray Lady, who now has some henna in her hair.
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Registration Required

It’s kind of stupid that the New York Times website requires you to register, but on the other hand, it’s quick and it’s free, and in the nearly five years that I’ve used the site, I haven’t received a single e-mail from the Times.

Anyway, register, because there’s a pretty interesting in-depth piece today about Bush v. Gore: Election Case a Test and a Trauma for Justices, by the Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Linda Greenhouse, attempting to go behind the scenes during that crazy time. She writes that “any attempt to construct a narrative of those 20 days encounters substantial gaps and intriguing unanswered questions,” but she notes that since the case ended, “the justices are behaving almost like survivors of a natural disaster who need to talk about what happened in order to regain their footing and move on.”

I know one of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s current law clerks (each justice has three or four clerks each term) — we sang together in a college a cappella group and then went on to the same law school. A few days after the final decision in Bush v. Gore came down, I e-mailed him and asked him if he could tell me anything about what those several days had been like. He responded that although he couldn’t reveal any details, the chaos was outweighed by the “coolness” of the whole thing, and that this would probably be the highlight of his professional career. “Many of my co-clerks had feared that our term would pale in comparison to last term’s sexy constitutional cases, but I think we’ve scored big with the elections cases,” he wrote. Yeah, I’d say so.