brees, to recycle yesterday's post, the perjury thing cuts two ways also.
His random thought was that the boot of segregation should not be lifted from the throats of American blacks. As Rosen says in his article, "Rehnquist wrote that the Court should not be moved by moral or social concerns."
In the memo, the future Chief Justice said, "In the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are. I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by liberal colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson [the legal foundation for mandatory racial segregation] was right and should be re-affirmed."
Years later, when his confirmation as Chief Justice was on the line, Rehnquist, in a cowardly move, would tell senators that the memo represented Jackson's -- not Rehnquist's -- views.
This canard was demolished in "Simple Justice," Richard Kluger's great history of the Brown v. Board of Education case, published in 1976. That did not prevent Rehnquist from apparently lying through his teeth to save his judicial skin in 1986.
Jeffrey Rosen notes that Rehnquist, while being questioned by Senator Edward Kennedy and others, insisted under oath that the memo represented Jackson's views.
Kennedy asked, "Do the I's refer to you, Mr. Rehnquist?"
"No, I do not think they do," Rehnquist replied. nytimes.com
I haven't noticed many of the "truth and justice" / "is is" crowd calling for Rehnquist's head on the "I" matter, but I may have missed something. I guess Rehnquist can be accepted as a proper moral reformationist, so it doesn't matter, right? His views on this might be construed as relevant to his office, but that would be a misconstrual, eh? There are some other skeletons in Rehnquist's closet that came up during his Chief Justice hearings, but "I can't recall" was sufficient there. |
