William Rehnquist

William Hubbs Rehnquist was a far-right Supreme Court Justice first appointed by Richard Nixon as an associate justice, then made chief justice by Ronald Reagan, after getting "the highest negative vote ever received by a confirmed justice" up to that time at 33,The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American 80s by Paul Slansky (1989) Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0671673394. which was also the maximum until the Republicans eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in 2017.Fact check: Republicans, not Democrats, eliminated the Senate filibuster on Supreme Court nominees by Camille Caldera (October 1, 2020) USA Today. Sexual assaulter Brett Kavanaugh had 48 votes against him in 2018. In 2020, the Republican-controlled Senate removed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, knowing that they wanted to ram through nominees who were even more unpopular than Rehnquist (Brett Kavanaugh received He served on the Supreme Court until his death in 2005.William Rehnquist He has been described by some as a “rigid conservative,” with one critic of him writing "If you were a homosexual, a racial or religious minority, a woman, an alien, an accused criminal, or someone facing the death penalty, you were not going to get Rehnquist’s vote.”Overruled: How Conservative Was Chief Justice Rehnquist? It's also said he voted "with the prosecution in criminal cases, with business in antitrust cases, with employers in labor cases, and with the government in speech cases."Bob Woodward & Scott Armstrong, The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court. 1979. Simon and Schuster.
==Voter suppression in Arizona==
As the Jim Crow era began coming to an end, Black voters began leaving the Party of Lincoln (GOP) for the Democratic Party making the GOP increasingly White. The GOP struggled to win in cities, and concluded from the results of the 1960 election that a new strategy was needed."Voter Fraud" by Carol Anderson. In: Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past, edited by Kevin M. Kruse & Julian E. Zelizer (2022) Basic Books. . Pages 299-311. Thus was born which focused on the 1964 election in Arizona, which was based on a scheme led by Rehnquist in the 1962 election in Phoenix. The scheme consisted of:
*"Caging", sending mail to registered voters and using any returned mail as the basis for challenging the legitimacy of registrations
*Sending deceptive mailers and phone calls to registered Democrats, stating that they will be arrested if have a traffic violation and they vote, or telling them to vote for Martin Luther King Jr. who was not on the ballot
*Sending GOP "poll watchers" to polling places, specifically to harass minority voters, including both people with "Ballot Security" armbands and uniformed-and-armed off-duty police officers
Operation Eagle Eye became a blueprint for future voter suppression strategies.
==Beliefs==
Rehnquist was infamous for his far-right opinions, especially in his early days on the court, even earning the nickname "The Lone Ranger" due to the frequency of him being the lone dissent in a ruling.Reagan's Mr. Right He infamously said in 1952, "I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be re-affirmed,"William Rehnquist, "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases," 1952 and although he disavowed the article where this was stated, there is have evidence of him defending segregation as a Constitutional right as late as 1993.There’s Unsettling New Evidence About William Rehnquist’s Views on Segregation In 1970, his belief in segregation was so strong that he advocated for a Constitutional Amendment allowing local governments to segregate schools.Rehnquist Wrote School Segregation Memo
Unsurprisingly, his opinions on LGBT people were about on the same level as his opinions on non-white people, to the point where the gay rights organization ACT UP called him one of the major figures in the fight against homosexual rights in the United States at the time.LGBTQ History Month: The early days of America's AIDS crisis In Ratchford v. Gay Lib, he essentially said that homosexuality is contagious.RATCHFORD v. GAY LIB, 434 U.S. 1080 (1978) He sided with the majority in Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld the constitutionality of sodomy laws.Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986) This same logic led him to dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned the aforementioned case.LAWRENCE V. TEXAS (02-102) 539 U.S. 558 (2003)
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