William Rehnquist - Wikipedia

Excellent biography and history share

Thank you, my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that October 1 is the anniversary of the birth of American jurist and lawyer William Hubbs Rehnquist "who served on the Supreme Court of the United States for 33 years, first as an Associate Justice from 1972 to 1986 and then as Chief Justice from 1986 until his death in 2005."
I thought he was a wonderful Associate Justice and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Rest in peace William Hubbs Rehnquist.

The Legacy of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist [by liberals in general.]
"Panel titled: The Legacy of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.
Appearing: Chris Schroeder (Duke University School of Law), moderator; Jeff Powell (Duke University School of Law), Tom Rowe (Duke University School of Law), Erwin Chemerinsky (Duke University School of Law), Laura Underkuffler (Duke University School of Law), Neil Siegel (Duke University School of Law), panelists."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FnpfJ924QA

Images:
1. Rehnquist and his wife, Nan. Photo courtesy the Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.
2. Rehnquist as a child. Photo courtesy of The Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.
3. U.S. Supreme Court, 1998 Back row (left to right): Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Hackett Souter, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer; front row (left to right): Antonin Scalia, John Paul Stevens, William Hubbs Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy.
4. Chief Justice William Rehnquist administers the Oath of office to President George W. Bush at his second inauguration Thursday, January 20, 2005

Biography from
1. oyez.org/justices
2. supremecourthistory.org

1. Background from oyez.org/justices/william_h_rehnquist
"William Hubbs Rehnquist is remembered as one of the most successful Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States and is frequently mentioned in the same breath as his inspiration, Chief Justice John Marshall. Rehnquist was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on October 1, 1924. He grew up with parents of modest but comfortable means, both of whom were conservative Republicans. He attended public schools all throughout his childhood, graduating from high school in 1942. He moved to Ohio for a brief stint at Kenyon College, but his education was interrupted by World War II. Rehnquist served in the United States Army Air Force as a weather observer in North Africa. After the war, Rehnquist finished his undergraduate degree at Stanford University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science. He continued his education at Stanford, receiving his master’s degree in Political Science. Then he moved on to Harvard University for a master’s degree in Government. Rehnquist returned to Stanford to get his law degree, graduating in 1952 at the top of his class. Rehnquist thoroughly impressed his professors, one of whom contacted Justice Robert Jackson, a moderate on the Supreme Court of the United States. He hired Rehnquist as a clerk to illustrate conservative reasoning and to assist Jackson in forming his own conclusions. During the year Rehnquist worked as Jackson’s clerk, Rehnquist wrote what is now considered a very controversial memo to Jackson regarding Brown v. Board of Education. This memo urged Jackson to reaffirm Plessy v. Ferguson, the decision that is cited as establishing “separate but equal” treatment regarding segregation. After his clerkship, Rehnquist moved to Phoenix, Arizona to work in private practice for sixteen years. During that time, he immersed himself in politics, culminating in his efforts campaigning for Barry Goldwater for president in 1964.

In 1969, Rehnquist moved back to Washington, D.C. after Richard Nixon won the presidency to serve as a deputy attorney general for the Justice Department. He spent the next two years impressing President Nixon by tackling such issues as wiretapping for the Justice Department. President Nixon then nominated Rehnquist to the Supreme Court as an associate justice. Rehnquist’s Senate hearing proved that his undiluted conservatism was not universally accepted among the predominantly democratic Congress. The Senate fixated on the memo regarding Plessy during questions about his past career. Rehnquist maintained that the memo reflected Justice Jackson’s views and not his own. Ultimately, the memo did not bar him from Senate approval, as Rehnquist procured the majority he needed to become an associate justice with 68 voting for him and 26 voting against him. Rehnquist stayed true to his conservative values, dissenting in cases such as Roe v. Wade, in which the Court voted to legalize abortion. Fifty-two solitary dissents later, he earned the nickname the “Lone Ranger.” Rehnquist did not always embody the image of a lonely, curmudgeon dissenter. He authored some important majority decisions during his tenure as associate justice, such as National League of Cities v. Usery. This case involved a government regulation of state government workers’ hours and wages and limited Congress’ power to interfere with states’ rights.

In 1986, Chief Justice Warren Burger retired, and President Ronald Reagan appointed Rehnquist to fill the position. His nomination was once again approved by the Senate. Another conservative, Antonin Scalia, was selected fill Rehnquist’s vacant associate justice seat. Rehnquist used this time with a new conservative ally to narrow the breadth of decisions he had dissented to in the past, such as cases concerning abortion rights and affirmative action. In 1989, President Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy to the bench. In three years, President Reagan had created a new conservative majority on the court, and Rehnquist took advantage of his new conservative alliance.

Rehnquist flourished as Chief Justice and showed an acumen for pragmatism and leadership. His slow-to-anger temperament helped in his devoted majority-building efforts. Even the liberal justices recognized his fairness toward his liberal opponents. Most impactful was his rigid organization style with a heavy emphasis on punctuality from clerks and justices alike. Rehnquist’s approach to conservatism differed from his colleagues. He looked beyond pure originalist ideals to allow future consequences to factor into his decisions. In 2003, Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion in Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, which allowed employees to bring suit against states and state government employers under the Family and Medical Leave Act. This decision aggravated Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who argued that this decision impeded upon states’ rights. After thirty-three years of service to the Supreme Court, Rehnquist fell ill in 2005. He refused to retire even after his diagnosis of thyroid cancer and remained Chief Justice until his death on September 3, 2005."

2. Background from supremecourthistory.org/timeline_rehnquist.html
"William H. Rehnquist, 1986-2005
1972-1986 Associate Justice, 1986-2005 Chief Justice
WILLIAM HUBBS REHNQUIST was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 1, 1924. He grew up in the suburb of Shorewood, the son of a paper salesman. Rehnquist's strongly conservative views can be traced directly to his childhood. According to a Washington Post report, the political heroes in the Rehnquist household were "Republican standard bearers such as Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie and Herbert Hoover." When Rehnquist was asked (during the Democratic administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt) by his elementary teacher about his career plans, he replied, "I'm going to change the government."

He served in the Army Air Corps during World War II as a weather observer in North Africa. Following the war, he attended college on the GI Bill, earning both a B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) and M.A. in political science at Stanford University in 1948. Rehnquist received a second M.A., in government, from Harvard two years later. He then entered Stanford Law School, where he graduated first in his class in 1952. (The student who ranked third was Sandra Day, who later joined him on the Supreme Court.) Rehnquist was described by one of his instructors as "the outstanding student of his law school generation." He also had the reputation among his classmates as a formidable advocate of the conservative point of view on political issues.

Rehnquist met Justice Robert Jackson when he came to Stanford to dedicate the new law school building in the summer of 1951. An interview for a possible clerkship with him was arranged by a professor who was a former Jackson clerk. Despite Rehnquist's feeling, following the interview, that Jackson "had written me off as a total loss," he was offered the highly coveted position. Jackson, a moderate, does not appear to have had any influence on Rehnquist's already well-developed political or judicial philosophies. Indeed, in his book on the Supreme Court, Rehnquist speaks well of Jackson, but no such influence is noted. Justice Felix Frankfurter seems to have made more of an impression; Rehnquist describes Frankfurter as a "magnetic" personality to whom he was "tremendously drawn ... by his willingness to discuss and argue while asking no quarter by reason of his position or eminence."

What Rehnquist considered to be the too-liberal views of his fellow law clerks certainly made a strong impression on him, and in 1957 he published an article in U.S. News and World Report criticizing their "extreme solicitude for the claims of Communists and other criminal defendants, expansion of federal power at the expense of State power, great sympathy toward any government regulation of business--in short, the political philosophy now espoused by the Court under Chief Justice [Earl] Warren." Rehnquist contended that this political bias on the part of the clerks might have some influence over which cases the Court chose to decide, but not over the way any justice voted in a particular case.

In 1953, following his clerkship, he married Natalie ("Nan") Cornell, whom he had met at Stanford, and the couple had a son and two daughters. Rehnquist went to work for a law firm in Phoenix, choosing that city for its climate, both meteorological and political. He followed advice that Justice Frankfurter had given him "that conservatives as well as liberals ought to get active on the political scene." He became a Republican party official and an outspoken opponent of liberal legislative initiatives such as busing to achieve school integration. While campaigning for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, Rehnquist became friendly with Richard Kleindienst, another Phoenix attorney. Kleindienst was appointed deputy attorney general in Richard Nixon's administration and arranged for Rehnquist to become assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

One of Rehnquist's principal functions in this job was to screen, along with Kleindienst and Attorney General John Mitchell, candidates for potential Supreme Court positions. When attempts to find a suitable candidate to replace retiring justice John Marshall Harlan had reached an impasse, Mitchell informed Rehnquist that they had settled on someone--Rehnquist himself. Despite his relative youth (he was forty-seven), inexperience, and political views that diverged from those of many senators, his nomination was confirmed, 68-26, December 10, 1971. He joined the Court on January 7, 1972, the same day as Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

Rehnquist summarized his vision of the nation's constitutional structure in a speech at the University of Texas a few years later:

It is almost impossible ... to conclude that the [Founders] intended the Constitution itself to suggest answers to the manifold problems that they knew would confront succeeding generations. The Constitution that they drafted was intended to endure indefinitely, but the reason for this well-founded hope was the general language by which national authority was granted to Congress and the Presidency. These two branches were to furnish the motive power within the federal system, which was in turn to coexist with the state governments; the elements of government having a popular constituency were looked to for the solution of the numerous and varied problems that the future would bring.

During his early years on the Court, despite the presence of three other Republican appointees, Rehnquist was often the only dissenter, espousing a view of states' rights and limited federal judicial power that many regarded as outmoded. He resisted the view of the other eight members of the Court that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to, and required heightened scrutiny of, state-sponsored discrimination against illegitimate children, resident aliens, and women. Indeed, he insisted that the Equal Protection Clause had only marginal application beyond cases of racial discrimination. In the area of criminal procedure, Rehnquist urged the Court to overturn Mapp v. Ohio (1961), which made the rule excluding illegally seized evidence from admission in a trial applicable to the states. Rehnquist also seemed hostile to Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which guaranteed that suspects in police custody be informed of their rights before interrogation, although he never directly argued that it should be reversed.

Still, even in his early years on the Court, Rehnquist was less likely to be in dissent than liberal justices William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall. The ideas expressed in some of Rehnquist's early dissents became influential in later majority opinions. As Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe observed, "Even in lone dissent, he has helped define a new range of what is possible."

When dissenting, Rehnquist made his most telling points in opposition to the majority's efforts to enact "desirable" social policy with little support from the constitutional or statutory provisions they are supposed to be interpreting. An example is United Steel Workers of America v. Weber (1979). This case involved an affirmative action plan devised by the Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Company and the United Steel workers. The "voluntary" plan reserved for blacks half of available positions in an on-the-job training program. Brian Weber, excluded solely because he was white, filed suit based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provides that "it shall be unlawful for an employer ... to fail or refuse to hire ... any individual . . . because of such individual's race." The statute goes on to say that its provisions are not to be interpreted "to require any employer ... to grant preferential treatment to any individual or group." Nevertheless, a 5-2 majority reversed the lower courts, finding that the discrimination against whites was not against the "spirit" of Title VII and consequently not prohibited. In a bitter dissent, Rehnquist concluded that "close examination of what the Court proffers as the spirit of the Act reveals it as the spirit of the present majority, not the 88th Congress."

Rehnquist also dissented in Roe v. Wade (1973), in which the majority based a woman's right to an abortion on a constitutional right of privacy that arose not from the terms but from the "penumbras" of the Bill of Rights. He wrote, "To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment."

The 1975 term saw Rehnquist come into his own as the leader of the ever-shifting conservative wing of the Court. He wrote several majority opinions that cut back the power of the federal government vis-à-vis the states. The most notable of these was National League of Cities v. Usery, in which Rehnquist used an expansive reading of the Tenth Amendment to strike down a federal statute that regulated the wages and hours of state government employees, although such regulation was within Congress's commerce power. The opinion showed that if faced with a choice between judicial restraint and states' rights, doctrines he generally supported, Rehnquist was prepared to defend states' rights more aggressively.

When Warren Burger announced his resignation as chief justice and President Ronald Reagan nominated Rehnquist as his replacement June 20, 1986, there was a firestorm of protest among liberals. Sen. Edward Kennedy denounced Rehnquist as having an "appalling record on race," and liberal columnists branded him a right-wing extremist. A concerted effort was undertaken to find something in his past that might provide a basis for defeating the nomination. Assorted allegations were raised concerning harassment of black voters when he was a Republican party official in Phoenix, the handling of a family trust, a memo he had written to Justice Jackson as a law clerk urging that the "separate but equal" doctrine not be overruled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and racially restrictive covenants in the deeds to his Phoenix house and summer home in Vermont. The Senate perceived that these allegations were either unproven or, if true, were "ancient history" and irrelevant to his fitness for the post of chief justice. Significantly, no serious charge of misconduct was alleged as to Rehnquist's nearly fifteen years as an associate justice. After much controversy, he was confirmed September 17 by a 65-33 vote.

If the 1975 term saw Rehnquist become a major force on the Court, it was the 1987 term, his second year as chief justice, that saw him mature in that position. In a speech he gave in 1976 Rehnquist had discussed the role of the chief justice, citing Charles Evans Hughes as his model because of his strong belief in unanimity of decision and his willingness to modify his opinions in order to attract additional votes.

Following that advice, in the 1987 term he achieved a high level of agreement with his fellow justices, ranging from 57.6 percent with Thurgood Marshall to 83.1 percent with Anthony Kennedy. His managerial abilities in the 1987 term won the praise of Justice Harry Blackmun, who deemed him a "splendid administrator in conference." For the first time in years, the Court concluded its work prior to July 1, in part because it had taken on fewer cases.

During the 1987 term, Rehnquist also showed that he could be flexible, joining with the more liberal justices to subject the dismissal of a homosexual CIA agent to judicial review and to support the freedom of speech claims of Hustler magazine to direct off-color ridicule at a public figure. Most significant, in Morrison v. Olson (1988) Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion upholding Congress's right to appoint independent counsels to investigate and prosecute high government officials, a right that was challenged by the Reagan administration.

Rehnquist was an effective manager whose humor and fairness contributed to the cordial relations among the justices. He enjoyed a variety of hobbies, including oil painting, singing, stamp collecting, theater-going, and poker. Rehnquist, a widower since 1991, found time to write three popular books on the Court's history: The Supreme Court: How It Was, How It Is (1988), Grand Inquests: The Historic Impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson (1992), and Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876 (2004). He was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in October 2004 and died on September 3, 2005 at age 80."

FYI LTC John Shaw COL Mikel J. Burroughs Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen LTC Greg Henning LTC Jeff Shearer Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price CPT Scott Sharon CWO3 Dennis M. SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL SSG William Jones SGT (Join to see) SGT John " Mac " McConnell SP5 Mark Kuzinski PO1 H Gene Lawrence PO2 Kevin Parker PO3 Bob McCord Maj Kim Patterson COL Charles Williams

He was the reverse of what we saw from 2008-2016 when the SCOTUS seemed to be overriding the states at every turn.