Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 8:33 AM by Gene

William Rehnquist was supposedly a conservative justice, but his too-long stewardship of his court was in some ways an extension of Warren Burger's, as the Nine Fingers continued to make law out of thin air, and to improvise their way around the Constitution. His landmark ruling is Bush v. Gore, and whatever one thinks of its merits it was the sound of justice flailing. That we now view the Fingers as a superlegislature owes to their intellectual torpor of the last thirty-five years. The Chief Justice gallantly tried extending his rule through terminal cancer, but his pride and stubbornness merely put off the inevitable, an inevitable that would have been better served with retirement. Still, he was exceptionally cultivated, a man of real dignity, with a surpassing love of the law, and he almost overcame what his court amounted to. RIP.

Already the HACKS are SMILING:

Bush’s weaker political standing may nudge him another way now, toward someone like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, an African American or a woman like appellate court Judge Edith Clement.

TRANSLATION: Another David Souter or Anthony Kennedy, a man the HACKS can put in their WEEDY GREENHOUSE to GROW in OFFICE. Well, maybe. Or maybe not.