Word: rehnquist
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...death last week of Chief Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist at 80 was a surprise but not a shock. He had been stricken with thyroid cancer last year and had been widely expected to resign over the summer. But "the Chief" pressed on with his work, hosted his annual basketball-and-croquet get-together with his former clerks in June, angrily denied he was resigning and watched his former Stanford Law School classmate Sandra Day O'Connor step down before him. Friends said Rehnquist had hoped to make it to the opening of the court on the first Monday in October...
...sending another name to the Senate. Besides, there is not much reason to hurry: the Senate Judiciary Committee had planned to meet for several days this week to consider the nomination of John Roberts to replace O'Connor as an associate justice--a schedule that will be affected by Rehnquist's funeral. Even if Roberts' nomination is approved this month, as is expected, the Senate is incapable of acting on two nominations in the next 30 days. If things go quickly--and in Supreme Court nomination politics, they almost never do--Bush will be lucky to have Rehnquist's replacement...
...case, the next chief will work in Rehnquist's shadow for at least a decade, if not longer. Appointed by Richard Nixon in 1971 to replace John Marshall Harlan and selected by Ronald Reagan in 1986 to succeed Warren Burger as Chief Justice, Rehnquist sat on the court for 33 years. Only four other Justices had longer terms. Rehnquist continued the rightward march of the court begun during the Burger era and executed what legal scholars call a revolution in federalism, leading the court in a series of decisions that returned powers to the states that Congress had tried...
Outside law schools, the Rehnquist court will be remembered for its bitterly split 5-to-4 decision in 2000 in Bush v. Gore, which many Democrats saw as sneaky Republican prestidigitation to give George W. Bush the White House. It was one of the few decisions in which Rehnquist supported the use of federal power to restrict a state, one whose supreme court had ordered a manual recount of the ballots in the presidential race. But Rehnquist didn't win them all, and his first years on the court were often spent in lonely dissents. And over the years...
...possible nominees to the Supreme Court. For political reasons, the President was considering appointing a woman, although he displayed grave doubts about women in power. "I don't even think women should be educated!" he sputtered, according to a transcript reprinted in Nixon aide John Dean's book The Rehnquist Choice: The Untold Story of the Nixon Appointment That Redefined the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, Nixon's re-election fight loomed, and he believed that appointing a woman could win him an extra 1% or 2% of the vote. So when the discussion turned to a little-known Justice Department lawyer...