The Rehnquist protest starting at 3pm today is still ON – 5/24/02

Top Ten Reasons to Protest – 4/17/02

WHO JUDGES THE JUDGES?:

SAT MAY 18 TOWN HALL MEETING ON APPOINTMENTS OF FEDERAL JUDGES FLYER PRESS RELEASE

Press Release, May 9, 2002 re Protest plans<- NEW

Chief Justice Rehnquist's Sorry Record on Racism

Print this protest flyer Labor Day Flyer
Sign this open letter from members of the Shorewood community to the school board

Open Letter from September, 2001

To contact Shorewood school Distr. & see their info:

http://www.shorewoodschools.org/

Join out ListServe: justice-watch-wi

To contact us please send e-mail to aheitzer@igc.org

Nick Anderson, Kentucky -- The Louisville Courier-Journal.

PROTEST REHNQUIST’S 50 YEARS OF UNDERMINING DEMOCRACY & EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Friday May 24, by 3:00pm meet outside Shorewood High School, by the Oakland Ave. parking lot, just south of Capital Drive.

Join in the Coalition to protest this award & to educate the public about the need for Judges who favor civil & voting rights, and the full participation of all in our society - next planning meetings: Saturday, May 11^th and 18th at 10:30 am, at 3805 N. Bartlett (corner of Bartlett & Beverly, behind Shorewood High School), home of Larry Dupuis, 332-5468.

Sign the open letter or contact the Shorewood School Board & voice your opposition.

WHY PROTEST?

The order of five members of the Rehnquist Supreme Court to stop the 2000 Presidential vote count & select Bush as president was an act of “political partisans, not of judges of a court of law,” according to over 670 Law Professors

Moderate Republican Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens declared that this action undermined “the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

The “Rehnquist Five” selected Bush as president on Equal Protection on grounds that the same Court barely a week earlier found was unworthy of consideration. Their holding contradicted their own record of denying relief to historic victims of discrimination, based on a narrow view of constitutional injury & standing.

Rehnquist had a long prior record of hostility to voting rights on & off the Court. This included his role in “OPERATION EAGLE EYE,” to stall voting in Hispanic & African-American areas, by demanding already registered voters answer irrelevant questions and read the Constitution to GOP lawyers.

Rehnquist campaigned against protecting citizens of color from overt racial discrimination, on & off the bench:

He actively opposed a law in Phoenix outlawing racial discrimination by stores and restaurants.

As a Supreme Court law clerk, he wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court should “re-affirm” the racist Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which had upheld the constitutionality of overt “Jim Crow”racial segregation

He drafted a proposed constitutional amendment to bar court action & busing to remedy school segregation.

On the court, he had been anti-labor, hostile to victims of proven police misconduct, and voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, which protects women’s rights to choose.

Rehnquist ‘s attempt to deny his personal involvement and responsibility for some of his actions and writings, has been disputed by numerous eyewitnesses and court historians.

For sources & more information, please see Rehnquist’s Record Against Civil Rights, below, and the other information cited on this page.

Rehnquist’s Record Against Civil Rights – a brief synopsis

“[A]s a Phoenix civic leader Rehnquist spoke out forcefully against a local anti-discrimination ordinance and asserted in opposition to a 1967 desegregation program in the city’s schools that “we are no more dedicated to an ‘integrated’ society than we are to a ‘segregated’ society.” As an Assistant Attorney General and head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Nixon administration, he was well known as the Justice Department’s most ardently prosecutorial advocate of wiretapping, government surveillance, preventive detention, and other so-called law-and-order techniques of a totalitarian cast. In 1970, he drafted for the White House a proposed constitutional amendment prohibiting busing to achieve desegregation. In the Supreme Court, he has consistently voted to constrict civil rights and civil liberties, opposing the claims of, among others, women seeking abortions, poor people who had to wait a year before qualifying for public medical services, aliens applying for civil-service jobs and lawyer’s licenses, and Negroes [sic] seeking expanded school-desegregation efforts in Denver, Richmond, and Detroit. He has voted to retain the death penalty, to permit warrantless searches for narcotics of people stopped for minor traffic offenses, and to authorize government agents to lure a defendant into a crime if he was deemed to have a “predisposition” to commit it anyway. In antitrust cases, he usually sided with business against government; in labor cases, he usually sided with management against unions. In September 1974, he gave a speech characterizing himself as a ‘libertarian’ in the sense of one who conceives minimum-wage and maximum-hour legislation as interfering impermissibly with an employer’s freedom of choice.”

from Richard Kluger, Simple Justice, Vol. II, pp. 770-71, fn. ¶ 6 (1975). This is the definitive work on Brown v. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court decision in 1954 which unanimously overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, and held that official racial segregation was unconstitutional. Rehnquist, however, authored a legal memorandum as a law clerk in 1952, which stated: “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 was right and should be re-affirmed.” See Kluger’s book for a full discussion of Rehnquist’s denial 19 years later that he really meant what he wrote, which became an issue in 1971 when he was being challenged as inappropriate to be confirmed for the US Supreme Court based on such views.

Hear eyewitness testimony re: Rehnquist’s record and his controversial role in attempting to suppress Hispanic voting, at http://www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20001212.html

For details on his role in attempting to undermine American democracy and give Richard Nixon the power to establish a police state, see Ch. 1 of Arthur Kinoy’s Rights on Trial (Harvard, 1983)

Rehnquist voted that prosecutors could exclude minorities from juries based on their race, & to bar courts from remedying systematic police abuse. Randall Kennedy, Race, Crime and the Law (Pantheon, 1997), pp. 122-123, 206-208.

Prepared by the National Lawyers Guild, Milwaukee Chapter, 606 W. Wisconsin Ave., # 1706, Milwaukee, WI 53203 (414) 273-1040, aheitzer@igc.org;

For more information:

Articles in the Shepherd: Sept. 6-12th, & Sept. 13-20th 2001 issues. http://www.shepherd-express.com/

National Lawyers Guild, including protecting our rights after 9/11. www.nlg.org/

People for the American Way info on US Supreme Court issues www.supremecourtvote.org/