Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died Saturday evening at his home in suburban Virginia. He was 80 years old.Rehnquist was appointed to the Supreme Court as an associate justice in 1971 by President Nixon and took his seat on Jan. 7, 1982. He was elevated to chief justice by President Reagan in 1986.
His death ends a remarkable 33-year Supreme Court career during which Rehnquist oversaw the court's conservative shift. Rehnquist presided over President Clinton's impeachment trial in 1999, helped settle the 2000 presidential election in Bush's favor, and fashioned decisions over the years that diluted the powers of the federal government while strengthening those of the states.
It is your humble friend and uneducated bloggers opinion that the President's appointment of Judge John Roberts by President Bush was delayed because Bush wanted to see whether Rehnquist would retire. There has been some speculation that Bush was considering Roberts for Chief Justice, should Justice Rehnquist place be vacated.
The death of Rehnquist will open yet another seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. There are a number of possible replacements names being bandied about, but my personal choice is Judge Roy Moore, Chief Justice of the State of Alabama's Supreme Court. My 2nd choice is a toss-up between Alan Sears or Jay Sekulow, Sears is the head of the Alliance Defense Fund, and Sekulow is the head of The American Center for Law and Justice.
Of course I don't expect any of those three to be nominated, and if they were, I certainly don't expect them to be confirmed.
But it would most assuredly anger the left, and that is worth the price of admission, in my opinion.
Update: Justice Rehnquist's corpse wasn't even cold yet and already leftist lawyer Alan Dershowitz was calling him a "Republican thug"
Tsk tsk....Now how low will you go?
11 comments:
"worth the price of admission"?? Yesterday you were damning people to Hell for making political capital out of the crisis in New Orleans. Today you are chuckling over how the death of a highly respected jurist can be used to anger your political opponents. Shame, Sir!
WOW!!
I'm sad to see Renquist go before his protege (Roberts) gets in....I think this is what he was holding out for.
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Bush will have the Senate Judiciary Committee juggling beteen Roberts and his next pick (Edith Jones or Michael Ludig, I hope)
I'd like to see him nominate some more Appeals Court judges at this same time..........Make the Dems go to the wall. --> And they will. It's a trap they know they are entering, but their base is forcing them to run right into it.
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There's no way Bush puts up your 3 Mark......If you really want a dogfight, then you need to start hoping he puts up Samuel Alito.
They don't call him "Scalito" for nothing.
You may be right, Liam, I'm sorry. I didn't think of it that way. Actually I was referring to the next Bush appointee, whoever it may be angering the left, not the death of Rehnquist. But maybe I should remind you that my anger in yesterday's post was directed at the leftists that would refuse to help dying people because they hate Bush. They are the same ones that would be most angered by the appointment of the 3 men I mentioned.
It is indeed a tragedy that Justice Rehnquist died and I don't mean to dimunish that fact. But he will have to be replaced. I was simply making a suggestion on who should replace him, and why I chose them.
I'd just like to point out that I understood your point, Mark. Perhaps I'm just not looking to find fault with the messenger all the time, when I can't find fault with the message, as many, especially on the Left, do.
Mark, remember the type of people you are dealing with.
When you say things that were not adressed in their memo, then they have to start picking apart your spelling, or wording, or accusing you of hate speech, you know, stuff like that, to avoid dealing with the horrible possibility that you might be right.
The nomination of extreme candidates is the price of admission to the circus that the left will put on, if they are nominated.
Not the death of Justice Rehnquist.
Nobody on the right is happy about that.
Mark: Not sure I would have taunted the loony lefties with such an open line. These folks are already bordering on a neural breakdown.
There will be plenty of time to absorb the death of the Chief Justice and consider his replacement. But with the disaster in the South, and the upcoming September 11th anniversary, people's focus is likely to be, and perhaps should be, elsewhere.
Just a quick thought thou before I get back to exploring why LA Governor Blanco refused Bush's request to federalize New Orleans relief efforts (see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301680.html)
President Bush appointed Roberts to fill the slot of retiring Justice O'Connor.
Roberts is about as mainstream as they come, similar to Justice O'Connor in many ways before she took the bench.
Yet all the catterwalling about "preserving the balance of the court" is garbage.
What balance? You mean after Clinton appointed a hard left ACLU lawyer, Ginsburg and then Ted Kennedy's former staffer Breyer?
Two elections gives President Bush the right to redress the imbalance created by those two appointments.
I hope he does so.
Now please excuse me while I go back to fighting the calumny against Bush's response to Katrina, brought on by the pathology of five years of unrelenting Bush hate.
God rest Justice Rehnquist's soul.
Hoo boy, things are fixin' to get interesting.
I'm for the Dems sticking totally together as a bloc on both vacancies. Make the '06 elections easier to handicap.
--ER
Me too, ER, and the louder they get, the better I will like it.
It gets closer to election, and we all haven't come to blows by then -- :-) -- we should do some sort of pool. I'm no good at setting things like that up, though, myself.
Dems will gain in both houses. Big gains in the House of Reps. That's my bet, and I'm sticking to it. :)
--ER
Sure... go for the safe bet Press... But of course that conventional wisdom was wrong in 2002.
Way too early to make any kind of prediction. Too many unknown factors: the economy and the war being at the top of the list.
It's entirely possible that the economy will take a hit from the gas shortage (which by the way would have been ameliorated had Clinton not vetoed ANWR drilling in 1995).
See: http://mikesamerica.blogspot.com/#112559520469942269
for more on that.
"It gets closer to election, and we all haven't come to blows by then..."
We have come uncomfortably close, ER. I for one, am glad we patched things up. Life's too short.
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