COLUMN LEFT : Black Robes and Judicial Brass Knuckles : The Supreme Court is steadily infringing on the First and Fourth Amendments.

On one of those newly released Nixon tapes, which give one the feeling of gazing up a rat’s nostril, we find the President fretting that government officials were insufficiently zealous in combatting security leaks.

Nixon: “You remember the meeting we had here when I told that group of clowns that we had around here, Renchler and that group? What was his name?”

Aide: “Rehnquist.”

Nixon: “Oh, Rehnquist.”

That exchange occurred on July 24, 1971. Less than three months later Nixon nominated William H. Rehnquist, then assistant attorney general, to the Supreme Court. Twenty years later, the Rehnquist court has come into its own. Consider some of its recent decisions:

By a 5-4 majority the court stated last week that Indiana had a right to ban totally nude dancing for reasons of “protecting order and morality.” That’s a blow not just to Indiana’s ecdysiasts but to anyone seeking protection under the First Amendment. The ruling (Barnes vs. Glen Theater) suggests that the government may deny free-speech rights simply on the basis of what it declares to be public morality.

Freshman Justice David H. Souter made the majority on that one. His vote also tipped the balance in the court’s 5-4 decision banning federally funded clinics from mentioning abortion to their patients. That ruling (Rust vs. Sullivan) was followed by the passage of a Louisiana law banning almost all abortions. Souter and his Supreme Court colleagues may reconsider Roe vs. Wade--the fundamental abortion ruling--as early as next year.

A theme united the Rust and Barnes decisions: increasing willingness by the court to find excuses to stop free speech.

Souter has provided the 5-4 majority in other areas. The court decided earlier this year that juries could consider coerced confessions “harmless error” if there was sufficient evidence amassed by other means against a defendant. Then last week the court ruled (5-4, in Wilson vs. Seiter) that poor prison conditions do not violate the constitution’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment” unless prisoners can prove that administrators displayed “deliberate indifference.” Try proving that.

The court, as Colleen O’Connor, national education director of the American Civil Liberties Union, points out, shows willingness in almost all instances to presume governmental goodwill and to shift power to the states and government agencies.

The Fourth Amendment is also under attack. In a pair of 6-3 rulings (Florida vs. Bostick and Lehnert vs. Ferris Faculty Assn.), the justices found that police do not violate citizen’s rights when they board a bus and ask permission of travelers to search their bags, or when they conduct warrantless searches of bags and containers found in automobiles. Enterprising reporters should test what happens when they refuse such a search.

Then, on Monday, the court issued what Morton Stavis, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, reckoned to be one of the worst decisions of the session in its fundamental legal implications.

The case, Coleman vs. Thompson, involved a death-row inmate in Virginia whose habeas corpus petition to the state’s highest court was dismissed because his lawyer missed the deadline by three days. The Rehnquist court denied the prisoner’s case any further review in federal courts.

This decision has big implications for civil rights. Since Reconstruction, constitutional rights have rested largely with the federal courts. In 1867, a law was passed giving the federal courts authority to hear habeas corpus petitions, recognizing that state courts were racist and tarnished by numerous failings. A century later, the civil-rights movement depended on federal courts for protection from state judges. “The big deal about the Warren court,” Stavis points out, “is that it made states toe the mark on constitutional rights.”

In 1963, in fact, William J. Brennan, whose seat on the Supreme Court was taken by Souter, authored a landmark decision guaranteeing the right of prisoners to have petitions heard by federal courts so long as they had not “deliberately bypassed” state courts. Last Monday, that ruling was overturned. Under the new decision, almost any failure to follow state procedure will result in forfeiture of the right to bring habeas corpus petitions to the federal courts, even if the fault is the lawyer’s, not the inmate’s. He’s three days late, you go to the electric chair.

On another of those 20-year-old White House tapes, Nixon was urging the use of “thugs” to beat up war resisters. Long-term, the man he remembered as the “clown . . . Renchler,” and the others that Ronald Reagan installed beside Rehnquist on the bench, wore the truly effective brass knuckles.