Chief Justice Rehnquist

This evening, CNN.com is car­ry­ing the head­line that U.S. Supreme Court Chief Jus­tice William H. Rehn­quist announced that he is most def­i­nite­ly not retir­ing. You know, I real­ly get the impres­sion that he feels that he was put on the bench (by Nixon) and then ele­vat­ed to Chief Jus­tice (by Rea­gan) by pres­i­dents which com­mand­ed more, uh, pres­i­den­tial respect than our cur­rent Com­man­der in Chief. Okay, so Nixon does­n’t have much respect left from my gen­er­a­tion, but from remem­ber that Rehn­quist is 80 years old. There was a time when the con­ser­v­a­tives real­ly, real­ly liked the man (Nixon, that is). Any­way, I fur­ther believe that Rehn­quist must feel that some of that grav­i­tas has been passed to him, and that he’s not crazy about the idea of “Dubya” nam­ing his successor.

I think the open let­ter about the spec­u­la­tors on his retire­ment is real­ly a let­ter to the pres­i­dent. One that reads ‘I’ll die before I let you pick the next Chief Jus­tice. Count on it.’ Any­way, I would­n’t expect him to vacate that seat for some time yet. He seems can­tan­ker­ous enough to stay there right up until the moment he keels over.

Edi­tor’s Note: Who would have thought I would have had a post all about con­ser­v­a­tives with­out a sin­gle curse word? Mom, if you’re read­ing, I’ll try hard­er next time.

Update 2005–9‑4: Chief Jus­tice William H. Rehn­quist passed away yes­ter­day evening at his home in Arling­ton. He was 80 years old. While this may make the above most either irrel­e­vant, or just taste­less, I’ll leave up to the read­er. How­ev­er, I do believe that while he was any­thing but a lib­er­al, he was cer­tain­ly a man that every­one respect­ed. He took his role very seri­ous­ly, know­ing full well the weight of every word spo­ken and writ­ten. He always struck me as a delib­er­ate per­son, who found bal­ance in what he knew was right, what the law said was right, and what the Supreme Court was required to do. We will be for­tu­nate as a coun­try and as indi­vid­u­als to have a replace­ment Chief Jus­tice in his mold, con­ser­v­a­tive or not. Giv­en the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion, that luck part seems like it might be more of a mir­a­cle. My orig­i­nal post was sim­ply point­ing out that I thought Rehn­quist him­self felt the same way.