I once shook Warren Burger’s hand (my own hand was bleeding and covered in purple ink spots at the time, and Burger looked down at it with obvious repulsion), but never William Rehnquist’s.

I keep wondering when someone is going to bring up the fact that, during both of his confirmation hearings (associate level and chief), ol’ Bill Rehnquist had to defend the 1952 memo that he wrote on the Brown v. Board of Ed case while clerking for Justice Robert Jackson (the feller that prosecuted the Nazis at Nuremberg, by the way), saying that Plessy v. Ferguson–that is, separate but equal–was right. Rehnquist tried to wriggle out of this statement on a number of occasions, but in 1986, Time quoted him as saying that though he now believed that Brown was decided correctly, “I think there was a perfectly reasonable argument the other way.”

The point being, this is a much more direct expression of, at the very best, a serious blind spot when it came to racial matters. The guy was on record as opposing integration. He still got the job. Twice. And a majority Democratic Senate voted him in the first time.

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