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Was The Timing Of The Rehnquist Announcement Politically Motivated?

The following "exclusive" was found at NewsMax:

When Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist announced in late October that he had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, we took the news sadly.

Now that the election has taken place and the dust has settled, we think the clever veteran of the Court and Beltway politics may have timed his announcement to give George Bush a small boost before Election Day.
Rehnquist could have waited a few days, until after the election was over -- as John Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, did to announce her breast cancer.

As NewsMax reader Miguel Tuas first pointed out to us, Rehnquist's timing was impeccable.

Though Rehnquist did not say he planned to step down, many media commentators said the ailing chief justice, now 80 years old, may have to leave the court to attend to his health.

And that suddenly injected the judiciary -- and the number of Supreme Court appointments the next president may have to make -- into the presidential campaign...

I guess that is where the decision in Bush v. Gore has led. The wingers now think that it is appropriate for Supreme Court Justices to enter into the partisan political fray to influence elections even in the absence of a pending case. The fact that Newsmax believes that Rehnquist is capable of such hanky-panky undermines the moral authority of the court and degrades the very notion of impartial justice. I certainly hope that Newsmax is wrong, but the fact that they could suggest such a thing (not to mention the possibility that they could be right) is a sad commentary on the state of our law and our politics.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at November 11, 2004 01:27 PM | TrackBack