Well sometime today it looks like someone who was a bit of a sexual predator and excess drinker in his younger days will be confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Maybe more disturbing than either of those things is the clear partisanship that he exhibits and has exhibited throughout his career.
Until fairly recently filibusters used to prevent nominees so obviously biased from being confirmed.
It wasn't a foolproof system but when you need 60 votes to move a nomination forward, you had to find someone who appealed at least a bit to the other party.
It was considered too important to let people like this get a lifetime appointment to the court that rules on issues that while clearly political in nature should be decided based on the Constitution and the law.
However the politicization of the Court has been going on for a while now and we see a lot of decisions come down to 5-4 votes, clearly indicating that the law is vague and the decision is driven by other considerations.
Its pretty clear that the constitution as written has a lot of areas that are challenged by modern life since it was originally written for a country that was primarily rural and developing.
Its held up pretty well but I'm pretty sure that the founders weren't thinking about assault rifles, abortion or gay rights when they wrote it.
Applying such a document to modern life shouldn't really be up to the courts, it should be done by the people or their representatives, but having an out of date document govern many decisions works to the advantage of some.
It has generally done a good job but it clearly could be improved in things like the electoral college among others. Of course I'm not sure we have agreement on how to fix it so we probably have to deal with a Supreme Court continuing to make policy because the Congress is unable to do so.
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