The Reform Party emerged as a challenge to the two major parties, Republican and Democratic, in the late 1990s when it appeared many voters were alienated from “politics as usual.”
Although the Reform Party was officially founded November 2, 1997, at a convention held in Kansas City, Missouri, it began with the presidential election of 1992. As a guest on the Larry King Live show February 20, 1992, H. ROSS Perot, a Texas billionaire, declared that if citizens would get him on the ballots in all 50 states he would run for president. The following day, his office was inundated with phone calls pledging support, and volunteers began to organize in each of the 50 states. By the middle of summer, United We Stand America (UWSA) had been organized to coordinate the Perot campaign; in early fall Perot announced his candidacy with Admiral James Stock-dale, retired, as his vice presidential candidate. Although Perot received no electoral votes in the 1992 election, he did gather nearly 19 percent of the popular vote.
By 1995 the ineffectiveness of UWSA lobbying elected officials from the two major parties had members calling for the formation of a new political party. On September 25, 1995, Ross Perot announced that he would help create the Reform Party. One by one, the states worked to form their own Reform Party organizations for the presidential election of 1996. For this election, Perot selected Pat Choate, a Vietnam War hero, as his vice presidential running mate. When the election votes were tallied, Ross Perot got just under 8.5 percent of the popular vote.
Since Perot had received the requisite number of popular votes, the Reform Party of the United States of America was qualified to receive federal funding in presidential elections. A national organizing convention was held in Nashville, Tennessee, in January 1997, and the National Reform Party was officially formed at a convention in Kansas City in November. At the Kansas City convention Russ Verney was elected chair and Patricia Benjamin was elected vice chair.
Party members pledged to reform the American political system. Founding principles included setting high ethical standards for the White House and Congress; balancing the federal budget; effecting CAMPAIGN EINANCE reform; term limits; creating a new tax system; addressing the anticipated needs of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security; promoting jobs; and initiating lobbying reform. The party’s platform elaborates these details.
In the hotly contested 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Albert Gore, Jr., Reform candidates Patrick Buchanan and Ezola Foster were not able to collect even a half million popular votes (.42 percent of the popular vote). The party itself was wracked with discord and split, with some members forming the American Reform Party.
See also Regents of the University of California v. Allan Bakke.
—Michele Rutledge
Rehnquist, William H. (1924-2005) chief justice of the United States
William H. Rehnquist became a justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1971 and then was appointed chief justice of the Court in 1986. He was one of only two chief justices to preside over a presidential impeachment.
Rehnquist was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 1, 1924, and grew up in the suburb of Shorewood in a strongly Republican family. He served in the army air corps during World War II, which enabled him, following the war, to attend Stanford University on the GI Bill. He received both his B. A. (Phi Beta Kappa) and his M. A. in political science. He received a second M. A. in government from Harvard in 1950, and then completed Stanford Law School, where he graduated first in his class in 1950. He clerked for Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in 1951, and the following year he married Natalie Cornell, and the couple had a son and two daughters. He went to work for a law firm in Phoenix, Arizona, where he became a Republican Party official and an outspoken critic of busing to achieve school integration. While campaigning for Gold-water in 1964 he became friendly with Richard Kleindi-enst, another Phoenix attorney. When Kleindienst became deputy attorney general in the Richard M. Nixon administration, he invited Rehnquist to become assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. When Justice Marshall Harlan retired from the Supreme Court, Rehnquist was appointed to fill his seat. At the same time, Lewis Powell was appointed to the Court.
Powell became a “swing” justice, while Rehnquist emerged as the Court’s rightist dissenter. Rehnquist’s early law clerks dubbed him “the Lone Ranger,” as he strongly dissented against majority court rulings on abortion, affirmative action quotas, church-state relations, criminal procedure, free speech, and the death penalty. Rehnquist’s dissents constructed a persistent critique of the majority “constructionist” philosophy of the Court.
Rehnquist thought the Warren and Burger Courts erred by nullifying what he viewed as true federalism in order to mandate radical egalitarian change in the states and localities. His interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause held that it applied to racial discrimination, not to abortion, sexual discrimination, or public assistance rights. He also claimed that the judicial opinions of the other justices exceeded judicial authority, and usurped the legislative and executive functions. In a 1976 speech espousing “originalist” judicial restraint, he argued that the Constitution’s framers desired the Congress and the presidency to “furnish the motive power for the solution of the numerous and varied problems that the future would bring.”
Chief Justice Burger retired in 1986. President Ronald W. Reagan nominated Rehnquist to replace Bur-ger as chief justice and conservative judge Antonin Scalia to fill the associate justice vacancy. Although this nomination caused much controversy, Rehnquist was confirmed by the Senate in a 65-33 vote. He conducted Court business in a collegial, disciplined, and expedited manner. He deliberately compromised his own leanings on certain cases to help the Court achieve unanimity. He fulfilled the demanding administrative duties of the chief justice in a manner pleasing to his colleagues. Rehnquist thus reduced the number of cases the Court decided, despite the docket’s increasing by one-fourth at the time.
The Rehnquist Court experienced mixed success in curbing the most famous rulings by the Warren and Burger Courts. It rolled back the rulings restricting the death penalty and weakened the exclusionary rule on criminal evidence, but upheld the procedural protections of the Miranda decision. Federal court power over state and local government was restricted. Rehnquist created slender majorities narrowing affirmative action quotas in the Ward's Cove Peking Co. v. Antonio (1989) and Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Pena (1995) cases.
Rehnquist sought to overrule Roe v. Wade (1973), the abortion case that underlay abortion rights, but ambivalent opposition by his longtime friend, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor prevented him. In the Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) cases, Rehnquist wrote the opinions for 5-4 and 6-3 majorities, respectively, in whittling down abortion rights. In Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), on the other hand, Rehnquist joined the minority in a 5-4 ruling upholding the substance of Roe.
The chief justice enjoyed more success for his interpretative agenda with cases involving euthanasia. In Cru-zan v. Missouri (1990), Rehnquist spoke for a 5-4 majority refusing to allow Nancy Cruzan’s parents to withdraw her life support on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Washington State v. Glucksberg (1997), Rehnquist managed to persuade some wavering justices to unanimously support his 9-0 majority opinion upholding Washington State’s statute banning physician-assisted suicide.
In 1997 Rehnquist ruled for a unanimous 9-0 court in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case that civil suits could proceed against a standing president of the United States. Rehnquist led a bitterly divided 5-4 Court in settling the Florida election case and thereby the 2000 presidential election in Bush v. Gore (2000).
In October 2004 the Supreme Court’s press office announced that Rehnquist had thyroid cancer. The chief justice missed many oral arguments in late 2004 and early 2005 but remained involved in the deliberations of the Court. Despite his illness, Rehnquist attended George W. Bush’s second inaugural and administered the oath of office. He gave no sign of retiring and reappeared on the bench in March 2005. However, his health continued to decline. He died at his home on September 3, 2005. John
G. Roberts succeeded him as chief justice.
Further reading: Kermit Hall, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); William H. Rehnquist, The Supreme Court,
Grand Inquests
2d ed. (New York, Knopf, 2001);
(New York: Knopf, 1992); David Savage, Turning Righ-t: The Making of the Rehnquist Supreme Court (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992).
—Christopher M. Gray and Amy Wallhermfechtel
World History
