Trivia: Can You Spot the Fake Horrific William Rehnquist Quotes Among All These Real Horrific William Rehnquist Quotes?
The fun part about this game is that even if you get the answers right, you’ll still be upset afterwards.
Twenty years ago last month, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died in office. He was 80 years old. In his eulogy for Rehnquist, President George W. Bush praised the longtime chief justice for his “powerful intellect and clear convictions,” and remembered with fondness his passions for painting, astronomy, college basketball, and singing. John Roberts, a former Rehnquist clerk who succeeded his old boss as chief justice, described Rehnquist in the pages of the Harvard Law Review as a “great man,” and “a patriot who loved and served his country.”
Below are ten quotes attributed to William Rehnquist. I made up two of them. Can you spot them? And more importantly, which two of any of these quotes, if you were to find out that they were indeed fake, would actually make William Rehnquist any less odious? (Scroll all the way down for the answers.)
As a law clerk to Justice Robert Jackson in 1952, Rehnquist wrote a memo defending the “unpopular and unhumanitarian position” that Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court’s 1896 opinion upholding the principle of “separate but equal” in the Jim Crow South, was “right and should be re-affirmed.”
As a Republican poll-watcher in 1960 or 1962, Rehnquist confronted two Black men as they waited to vote, challenging their ability to pass Arizona’s literacy test. “You’re not able to read, are you? You have no business being in the line,” he said. “I would ask you to leave.”
As a young lawyer in Phoenix in 1964, Rehnquist publicly opposed a proposed antidiscrimination ordinance in restaurants and hotels, arguing that requiring business owners to serve Black people would place an “indignity” on those business owners, and that it is “impossible to justify the sacrifice of even a portion of our historic individual freedom for a purpose such as this.”
In conversation with an Arizona state senator in 1964, Rehnquist said, “I am opposed to all civil rights laws.”
As a young lawyer in Phoenix in 1967, Rehnquist opposed a plan to integrate the city’s public schools, arguing that residents were “no more dedicated to an ‘integrated’ society than we are to a ‘segregated’ society,” and that schools “should not be saddled with a task of fostering social change.”
As an official in the Nixon Justice Department in 1970, Rehnquist drafted a proposed constitutional amendment to preserve de facto racial segregation in schools by creating legal protections for “neighborhood schools,” in order to keep them “free from supervision by the federal courts.”
As an official in the Nixon Justice Department in 1970, Rehnquist criticized the proposed Equal Rights Amendment as driven by “a virtually fanatical desire to obscure…physical distinctions between the sexes,” and criticized the amendment’s supporters for their rejection of “the traditional difference between men and women in the family unit.”
As an associate justice in 1978, Rehnquist dissented from a case in which the Court invalidated racial restrictive covenants in condominium deeds in San Francisco, arguing that “the private desires of ordinary Americans to keep undesirable elements from their neighborhoods are beyond the reach of the Constitution.”
As an associate justice in 1984, Rehnquist wrote a majority opinion allowing cops to delay the issuance of Miranda warnings to criminal suspects in the name of “public safety,” arguing that “police officers can and will distinguish almost instinctively between questions necessary to secure their own safety or the safety of the public and questions designed solely to elicit testimonial evidence from a suspect.”
As chief justice in 1988, Rehnquist led an unsuccessful effort to get the Court to uphold a controversial English-only law in Midland, Texas, writing in a memo to his colleagues that “common-sense policies that recognize our nation’s Anglo heritage fall comfortably within the scope of police powers reserved by the states under the Tenth Amendment.”
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ANSWER KEY:
I'm an Arizonan, and I knew all the Arizona items were true.
Uh-yup. He also refused, in writing, to sell his AZ home to black buyers. Just another Harvard hooligan, like Roberts and Scalia, opposed to modernity. .. Racism is, of course, scientific illiteracy. The genes responsible for cosmetic differentiation are roughly 1% of the overall human genome. Anf genetic segregation causes a host of terrifying illnesses.