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The Real Rehnquist

In recent years, there has been no other Supreme Court justice who had a personal history so loaded with racism.

I confess: I have a hard time saying "William Rehnquist, rest in peace."

Supreme Court Chief Justice Rehnquist, who died on Saturday night, spent much of his adult life trying to restrict the rights of American citizens and to empower further the already-powerful.

He rose to prominence as a right-wing attorney who decried the Earl Warren court for being a hotbed of judicial activism (left-wing judicial activism, as he saw it). He then became, as a Supreme Court justice, a judicial activist of the right-wing sort, overturning laws made by Congress (that protected women against domestic violence, banned guns near school property, and prohibited discrimination against disabled workers) and steering the justices into Florida's vote-counting mess in 2000 (an act that only coincidentally--right?--led to George W. Bush's presidency).

In that case--Bush v. Gore--Rehnquist, for some reason or another, put aside his much heralded belief in state sovereignty, which led him, on other occasions, to grouse about limits on the abilities of states to execute criminals. When it came to states frying prisoners, he advocated a hands-off approach. In vote-counting, he was all for intervention.

Read the rest of David Corn's article on alternet.org