With the public support of two prominent Republican senators (him and her) firmly in hand, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor will coast to confirmation later this summer. She'll replace David Souter. She'll be the first Latina (I'd like to say first Latino, too, but she has no such secret) to serve on the Court. Probably not the last.
I'll cut to the chase. Is it important that the SCOTUS be diverse? Is it important that it feature a black dude and a Puerto Rican lady? Is it crucial that it be populated with jurists of different age groups, like a few 40-year-olds, a few boomers and a few geriatric cases? Is it important for the genders to be split 5-4? Should an atheist get nominated soon? A Muslim? A homosexual? (Let's not wait for a hypothetical Republican president to get started on the last three categories.)
Oh. I get the feeling you expect answers. I don't have a whole lot of them. The only "answer" I like is that the Court has been far too Protestant, far too white and far too male for far too long. A non-answer I like even better is that as long as the nominees are all competent, their background and/or their skin color and/or their gender and/or their sexual orientation matters not a whit. I don't like pigeonholing people based on one facet of their being.
(Besides, let's acknowledge that it's a certainty, probability-wise, that a gay man has served on the Supreme Court already. I won't bore you with all the math or the regression analysis involved, because my inferior explaining skills are... inferior.)
The most interesting suggestion I've heard recently on this topic is to expand the size of the Court itself. Jack it up to 15, 21 justices. Diversity will practically do itself without trying. It'll take itself out of the conversation after the third Latino, the second paraplegic and the first completely out-of-the-box nominee.
I mean, it makes sense. 220 years ago, the pool of SCOTUS candidates was shallow. Finding nine qualified white male Episcopalian or Methodist landowners with lots of free time can't have been easy every day of the week. Now, we've got a slightly deeper swath of hopefuls.
In a way, that mega-court idea fits with my earlier suggestion that we extend representatives' and senators' and presidents' terms. We need better representation across the board in American government, and that includes a bigger Congress that spends less of its time campaigning, plus a wider court that reflects America's diverse identity better, because on a superficial level, that's important. Plus, we won't have to have the tired, worn-out "Wow, look, that nominee's not an old bald white guy from Harvard" conversation as much any more.
And no, I don't think my man Barack should appoint another 12 justices to get us to the magic 21. You could do it gradually, like over the course of four more Democratic administrations.
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