The recent death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist from complications associated with worshipping Satan have prompted legal scholars and commentators to frame his legacy. The emerging consensus is that Rehnquist was something of a trailblazer because he was widely considered a conservative wing-nut when appointed but a centrist at the end. While true, it should be recognized that this movement was due entirely to the subsequent appointment to the court of two raving psychotics, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who made Rehnquist appear moderate by comparison. So beyond simply continuing to take his Haldol, Rehnquist doesn’t deserve much credit for this.
The real legacy of the Rehnquist Court is the December, 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore, which metaphorically speaking handed the keys to the national school bus to a sixteen year old glue sniffer. Total deaths resulting from this decision are now approaching 50,000 based on the 9/11 intelligence failures, the pointless war in Iraq, and the Hurricane Katrina debacle. While these results will long be suffered, the bizarro world reasoning of Bush v. Gore was almost immediately forgotten except by those who savor the delicious irony of disenfranchising thousands of poor African Americans and aged holocaust survivors in Florida using the Equal Protection Clause. The court demonstrated its own view of the opinion’s specious logic in two ways: (1) nobody signed it and (2) it has no precedential value outside of that case.
Rehnquist’s legacy is alongside Chief Justice Roger Taney whose twenty-eight years on the court can be summed up in two words: Dred Scott. That disastrous 1857 decision, which held that slaves were more akin to property than to human beings, pretty much necessitated the civil war. Only legal scholars remember the hundreds of other decisions by the Taney Court which were important in expanding the power of the federal government and shaping the federal system. And perhaps that is as it should be.
Article comments
1 - adam
Right on.
2 - Jolly Roger
HangGeorge.com
3 - Al Barger
Fifth Dentist, I hope you've got better coming for us than this post, cause it's just garbage. This is no real writing, no argument, just a couple of quick paragraphs of name calling.
It would appear that you neither know nor care about the career of Rehnquist, except that you're still mad because he didn't hand the election over to the guy with less votes five years ago. Too bad, so sad. But this couple of sentences of calling the conservative justices names is not anything even vaguely to be mistaken for real thinking or writing.
You need to step up your game.