Tribute to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

• Author: Kyl, Jon
• Position: Testimonial

It may be that future legal scholars assessing the judiciary of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries will look back and consider one state to have been over-represented on a court that has nine members. I don't consider it anything but a blessing that retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor of Arizona, and the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist of Arizona, rose to the pinnacle of jurisprudence in this country at the same time. America has been the better for their service on the Supreme Court.

William Hubbs Rehnquist provided steady leadership on the Court through turbulent decades. Appointed to his seat by President Nixon in 1972 and elevated to Chief Justice by President Reagan in 1986, he showed that one man of integrity really can make a difference.

I first met him when he was a lawyer in Phoenix. He spent most of the 1950s and 1960s practicing law in our state, and raising a family there with his wife, Natalie, who passed away in 1991. He made an annual return to Arizona in the last decade of his life, to teach a course on Supreme Court history at the University of Arizona College of Law, my alma mater.

I came of age politically reading Barry Goldwater's 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative. William Rehnquist gave voice to that conscience--to a resolve that the liberties that Americans hold dear be protected and preserved--in the speechwriting that he did for Goldwater during the Senator's unsuccessful run for President against Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

While others wanted to remake human nature, the Goldwater conservatives appreciated it, as it is. They were alarmed by the ambitions, the growth, and the power of government since the New Deal. This impulse of vigilance came from a deep respect, which Rehnquist evinced time and again, for our founding charter, the Constitution, and the enumerated powers it granted to government. This was the basic platform on which Barry Goldwater and his emerging wing of the Republican Party, including William Rehnquist and also the man who would elevate him to Chief Justice, Ronald Reagan, constructed a conservatism for our time.

When Rehnquist left his position as Assistant Attorney General of the United States to sit on the Supreme Court, and later be its Chief Justice, he would spend thirty-three years on the Court evaluating cases and the law in a way that generally tried to defer to the other two branches of government--those whose officers are not appointed, as he was, but...