Jon Kyl: “the death of William Hubbs Rehnquist leaves us saddened but also grateful for his more than three decades of service to…”

“the death of William Hubbs Rehnquist leaves us saddened but also grateful for his more than three decades of service to his country as a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, including 19 years as its Chief Justice. I first met Chief Justice Rehnquist 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 from 1994 until last year, to teach a course on Supreme Court history at the University of Arizona College of Law, my alma mater. Appointed to his seat by President Nixon in 1972, and elevated to Chief Justice by President Reagan in 1986, he provided steady leadership at the Court through turbulent decades. He showed that one man of integrity really can make a difference. He was a conservative whose philosophy did not always carry the day, especially in his early years on the Court. More recently, there has been greater acceptance of his notion of balance between the authority of States and the Federal Government. His decisions helped prevent the rights of criminal suspects from being overemphasized to the point that law enforcement was hampered in doing its job. They curbed the Government's use of racial quotas, deemed by most Americans to be a squandering of the moral authority of the civil rights movement. They reaffirmed the religious freedom clause of the first amendment.…”