The Chief Justice is eighty and ailing, but speculation about his retirement, or worse, is premature and I believe that he's getting pissed.
Today he left the hospital and through his family, not the Court, informed the media that all the talk about him retiring anytime soon, barring further health problems, is just that, talk.
There were two audiences for the announcement, the chattering class and their readers is one; the White House and the lines of power pro and con that surround it is the other.
Now the president can get down to the serious business of picking a successor to Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who announced her impending retirement and then went abroad for awhile.
Meanwhile, a group of supporters has been urging her to to rescind her notice of retirement in order to stick around in case we DO need a Chief Justice any time soon. This was before Indomitabull Bill exited the hospital under his own horse-power.
Why do you think Chief Justice Rehnquist ain't quittin'?
Look at it this way. If it wuz you, and you had these very strong views, views that got you first to the Court and then to the top seat on the Court, views as to how the country should be run, and in which direction, and you had this one vote, and that's mainly all you had, and sometimes it was good enough to change things in the direction you wanted, or to prevent the country from going too far in a direction you thought was the road to damnation, would you give up that vote? The vote that makes the difference between right and wrong, just and unjust, power and whistlin' Dixie? I don't think so. That ain't the Bill I think we know.
Sen. Arlen Spector, who is fighting a form of cancer himself, and undergoing radiation or chemo that's taking a lot out of him, but not his fighting spirit and willingness to do a day's work for a day's pay, commented a few days ago that he thought he knew very well why Ol' Bill was hanging on so.
Apart from the idea that he's got no quit in him.
It's that Ol' Bill probably, as Spector says he does, gets up every day glad to know that he's got an important job to do, and he's bound and determined to see that he does it. This is what gives his life meaning. He'd have to be a different kind of person, or a lot more ill, to give up the major thing in his life that makes it worthwhile getting out of bed in the morning.
Also, maybe he was inspired by the end of the life of John Paul II, recently, who didn't step down when he had the chance and no one would have blamed him.
'Sonly one Power's gonna take that vote away from Ol' Bill, and that's a Power that doesn't do a lotta chattererin.'
I think he's going to be around for awhile.