Posted on 09/04/2005 12:00:37 AM PDT by Former Military Chick
Why wait? Do it now and tell him it's raining.
Colmes: This is a Fox News alert. Earlier tonight in suburban Virginia, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist passed away of thyroid cancer at his suburban Virginia home surrounded by his three children and his family. And joining us now to talk about it, famed attorney Alan Dershowitz. Mr. Dershowitz, thank you so much for being with us.
Dershowitz: Well, thank you.
Colmes: And how will this change the court, and what will William Rehnquist's legacy be?
Dershowitz: Well, William Rehnquist was one of the most judicially active judges. He was a judicial activist in the--in every sense of that term. He struck down more federal statutes than almost any other sitting judge. He intervened often in cases where there was an adequate state ground. You know, you hear so much about judicial conservative, judicial activist. He was a judicial activist by any statistical count. By any measure, he was more active than most of the so-called liberal justices. A striking example--
Colmes: But would it be fair to say that a conservative might call him an acti--or a liberal might call him an activist and a conservative who might tend to agree with him would call him a constitutionalist?
Dershowitz: No. I think you'd have to call him an activist, whether you are conservative or liberal. That is, he struck down congressionally enacted statutes because he didn't think that they comported with federalism. Take the most striking example. He had written for 30 years that the equal protection clause only applies in racial matters--it doesn't apply to aliens, it doesn't apply to age, it doesn't apply even to women; it only applies to race, that the 14th Amendment was written--the equal protection clause was written to protect blacks. Then comes along Bush v. Gore, and he joins the decision striking down the Florida count on the ground that it denied equal protection for a chad to be counted differently in one district than another--something that totally violated everything he had written for the previous 25 years. He was a Republican justice--
Colmes: But would you compare the--
Dershowitz: --and his vote could always be counted on by the Republicans.
Colmes: Is there a precedent for what will be known as the Rehnquist court? How would you characterize that court, and are there precedents historically for that? The Warren court was called activist a couple of decades earlier.
Dershowitz: He was much more activist. And I think the Rehnquist court was never the Rehnquist court. He moved more toward the center as he became chief justice and as he had Scalia and Thomas on his right flank and of course most of the rest of the court in the center or on his left flank. It--the decisions of Justice Rehnquist are not taught in law schools as great decisions. He'll be remembered primarily for his votes rather than for the content or quality of his decisions. And it's consistent throughout his life. He started his career by being a kind of Republican thug who pushed and shoved to keep African-American and Hispanic voters from voting.
Sean Hannity: All right--
Dershowitz: He had a restrictive covenant in his own lease which precluded the sale to Jews.
Hannity: Let me go, uh--
Dershowitz: There were so many things in his background that were extremely right-wing.
At this point, Hannity cut Dershowitz off and went to another guest. At the end of the hour, Hannity pointedly omitted Dershowitz when he thanked the guests who'd appeared to comment on Rehnquist's death.
I like Dershowitz on Israel, but on everything else he's pretty much a putz. He lacks common sense and apparently common decency as well. That's sort of a definition of an extreme liberal isn't it?
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