Legacy MattersThe body of Chief Justice William Rehnquist lay in repose for two days at the Supreme Court in Washington. His austere pine casket, flag-draped, was bourn by six pallbearers, all of whom served at one time as his clerk.
Imagine the thoughts of one of them, Judge John Roberts, nominated to succeed Justice Rehnquist as Chief Justice, as he carried the coffin of his mentor up the stairs to the Upper Great Hall and placed it on a catafalque that once held the body of President Abraham Lincoln. His past and future poised at the fulcrum of the reality of one death.
The New York Times reports on his funeral yesterday.
With soaring song and fond stories, family and friends recalled Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist on Wednesday not as the cerebral public conservative who helped transform the Supreme Court but as the private man who loved history, singing and cards and showed "how a wise man looks at the law and a good man looks at life," as President Bush put it in his eulogy.
Imagine his friend ever since Stanford Law 59 years ago, Sandra Day O'Connor who
spoke tenderly of an old friend turned colleague who relished wagers on everything from sports to the amount of snow that would fall in the court's courtyard....
If you valued your money, you would be careful about betting with the chief; he usually won," Justice O'Connor told more than 1,000 mourners at St. Matthew's Cathedral, including Mr. Rehnquist's designated successor and onetime law clerk, John G. Roberts Jr. "I think the chief bet he could live out another term despite his illness. He lost that bet, as did all of us, but he won all the prizes for a life well-lived. We love you, William Hubbs Rehnquist."
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The service nevertheless amounted to an extraordinary glimpse into the chief justice's personal side, much of which was well known to the Supreme Court bench and bar, but unseen by the public in his 33 years on the court and all but invisible in the months of his final illness, in which the court even declined to say precisely which kind of thyroid cancer he had.
There was thundering classical music from organ, brass and drums, some of it still new when the framers of the Constitution were growing up, including the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's "Messiah," a performance of which Chief Justice Rehnquist made a point of attending for 50 consecutive Christmas seasons through last year.
Supreme Court
Supreme Court Derrick Z. Jackson: 'The unvarnished truth about Rehnquist'
Posted on Saturday, September 10 @ 09:26:28 EDT
This article has been read 569 times. By Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe
PRESIDENT BUSH said William Rehnquist should be remembered for "improving the delivery of justice for the American people." To Rehnquist, justice meant just us white men, preferably connected, preferably straight and preferably with all limbs functioning.
This was a chief justice of the Supreme Court who dissented in last year's 5-4 ruling in favor of a paraplegic who sued the state of Tennessee for courtroom access. The man dragged himself up 24 stairs for a traffic violation hearing because the court had no elevator. When he did not show up for a second appearance, saying he was humiliated by crawling up the stairs, he was arrested.
Rehnquist was not impressed by the man's plight. "A violation of due process occurs only when a person is actually denied the constitutional right to access a given judicial proceeding," Rehnquist wrote. Translated, it is not enough that a man could not walk up the stairs. There must be evidence that Bull Connor was at the door to beat him back down.
Rehnquist, who died last week, spent his career standing at the door of the high court, beating down countless Americans, whether they were black or brown, gay or lesbian, Florida voters, or women trying to control their bodies. A half century ago, he wrote a memo as a clerk to Justice Robert Jackson that said the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson separate-but-equal ruling "was right and should be reaffirmed." In 1964 he spoke out against desegregation in public accommodations in Phoenix, saying it would result in the "unwanted customer and the disliked proprietor . . . glowering at one another across the lunch counter. It is, I believe, impossible to justify the sacrifice of even a portion of our historic individual freedom for a purpose such as this."
Rehnquist owned two homes in Phoenix and Vermont with restrictive covenants against selling to people of color and Jews and claimed to be ignorant of the clauses. When he was nominated to the court by President Nixon in 1971, Rehnquist feigned a change of heart, saying he came to realize "the strong concern that minorities have for the recognition of these rights. I would not feel the same way today about it as I did then."
History proved he felt the same way all along. Almost without fail for a third of a century, he voted against affirmative action for municipal workers and school desegregation plans, in utter disregard for the nation's injurious history of slavery, segregation and disparate resources. As recently as 2003, he wrote the majority opinion that struck down Michigan's mechanical point-system affirmative action for undergraduates at the University of Michigan. He then dissented from the opinion crafted by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor that upheld a more nuanced form of affirmative action at the Michigan law school. Rehnquist pooh-poohed even nuanced affirmative action as "a naked effort to achieve racial balancing."
Posted by: jasper at September 10, 2005 6:14 PM