wait, what? you want SCOTUS judges to each represent a certain region? I thought SCOTUS was supposed to represent the Constitution, as written, word for word? Am I misunderstanding?
“I thought SCOTUS was supposed to represent the Constitution, as written, word for word?”
Well of course.
The theory is that we get the best people for the job.
The reality is that we get a subset of people who live near the court and interact politically with the DC in crowd.
So their views are distorted by the trendy outlook of DC and NYC, and the law schools in that region.
Are property rights a big discussion in NY? Not like they are in the West, where the citizenry is confronted with a fedgov owning and controlling 1/3 to 1/2 the land mass.
Is Immigration and citizenship a big deal to people from suburbuan Virginia, as opposed to people in the Southwest and of course NYC where mass immigration has utterly changed the demography and politics of those places? Not until lately, although now even suburban VA and other places are starting to look like urban Brazil.
The court as it sits now has no white anglo saxon Protestant on it. The last one was Powell. In 220 years, that has never happened. It’s a court FOUNDED by Protestants, and yet not one somehow manages to qualify? How’d that happen?
There’s multiple factors but one way to guarantee that the court reflects the general outlook of the populace is to broaden the geographic and ideological pool in a decisive way. So the selection would be from each Federal district and hopefully the one superstar from those districts that would be appointed.
Otherwise we end up with 8 Ruth Ginsburg’s and 1 Sotomayor. All from Manhattan, and all with BA’s from Swarthmore and JD’s from Hahvahd or Yale.