Tea leaves on the Rehnquist watch

Scott McClellan won't say whether the White House has heard from any of the justices.

Published June 27, 2005 9:29PM (EDT)

There was no news this morning from Chief Justice William Rehnquist -- or from Sandra Day O'Connor, for that matter -- about any vacancies on the Supreme Court. That said, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan sure sounded cagey this afternoon when a reporter asked him if the White House had heard from any of the justices.

"Well, as I indicated this morning to some of you all, I said that I'm going to draw the line here because I'm not going to go down that road," McClellan said. "If there is a vacancy to announce, I would imagine that that would come out of the Supreme Court first. And that's the appropriate place for it to come out of, and I don't think you should read anything into that one way or the other.

"But if you ask me now and I say 'no,' and then you come back and ask me later, and I don't answer, then you're going to start speculating about all sorts of things. So I think it's -- I think it's best for me just to say, you know, if there's anything else to announce, I'm sure it will come from the Supreme Court."

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Not to read too much into some pretty thin tea leaves, but it's interesting that McClellan seems to have a pretty clear idea about how a purely hypothetical resignation-announcement process would work. As we noted earlier today, there are no rules for how a justice goes about retiring, and different justices have done it different ways. While many have done it by sending a letter to the president, Rehnquist announced Lewis Powell's resignation from the bench in 1987, and Rehnquist's predecessor, Warren Burger, announced his retirement at a press conference with President Reagan in 1986.

If McClellan is so sure that any word of a resignation this time will come from the Supreme Court, does he know something that the rest of us don't?


By Tim Grieve

Tim Grieve is a senior writer and the author of Salon's War Room blog.

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