Word: rehnquist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Rehnquist faced an even more difficult confirmation battle in 1986, when President Reagan nominated him to be Chief Justice. This time Democrats tried to prove that Rehnquist had lied during the 1971 confirmation process-not about the segregation memo but about whether he had intimidated minority voters as a Republican poll watcher during the 1960s in Arizona, where he was practicing law at the time. Rehnquist's critics produced affidavits alleging that he harassed voters at a predominantly black and Hispanic Phoenix precinct in 1964. Rehnquist issued a blanket denial that he had challenged the qualifications of minority voters...
...first five years on the court, Rehnquist wrote 24 solo dissents, so many that he kept a Lone Ranger doll on the mantel of his office fireplace. He was one of only two Justices to vote against Roe in 1973. But as more Republican appointees joined him, Rehnquist began a slow march from the court's fringe toward its center. Beginning in the 1980s, Rehnquist successfully limited the number of death-penalty appeals that federal courts can hear and also made it easier for police to present evidence in court that had been tainted by procedural errors. Under Rehnquist...
...Rehnquist's conservatism mellowed over the years. His early 8-1 dissents, so provocatively right-wing in tone, deliquesced in later years into establishmentarian opinions defending many precedents-even liberal ones. For example, he angered conservatives in 2000 when he personally wrote the opinion upholding Miranda v. Arizona, the decision requiring police to read those they take into custody their rights, a ruling Rehnquist had savaged over the years. "Miranda has become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture," Rehnquist wrote in an opinion that the fiery young Rehnquist...
...Rehnquist managed the court with a rare combination of efficiency and amiability, and the other Justices will miss him. Justice William Brennan, the late liberal icon, once called Rehnquist "my best friend up here." Unlike some of his predecessors, Rehnquist was fair about assigning opinion writing and tried to tamp down office politics. "There's no one who doesn't like William Rehnquist," says the University of Virginia's Howard. "He really is someone who is easy to be around and has a very unpretentious and pleasant manner...
...that Rehnquist is gone, his passions for limited government and strict constitutional interpretation will be carried further by his more ideological heirs, Thomas and Antonin Scalia-and, presumably, by whomever Bush appoints to replace him. But Scalia lacks the temperament-and Thomas, the vision-to match the departed Chief. His spare and often brilliant reasoning didn't ignite the conservative revolution that some predicted, but with the help of a new crop of like-minded colleagues, it did bring a generation of liberal activism on the court to an end.-With reporting by Melissa August, Perry Bacon Jr. and Viveca...