I think I'm going to disagree with you here.

It seems to me that over the years the Supreme Court has stretched the Constitution in order to deal with situations that the founders never intended it to deal with.

To some extent this is inevitable, since the founders could never have predicted how times and technology would change society. Distilling the core principles from the Constitution and applying those principles to new situations is a primary function of the Court.

Still, with each successive permutation, as decisions are based more and more on case law, it seems we lose sight of those principles. It is important to have Justices like Scalia, Thomas and Rhenquist who place rather more weight on original intent so that we do not, in our quest to make the Constitution relevant, lose sight of why it is there in the first place.

It's worth spending the political capital to make that happen.

Hmm, being from Seattle and hopefully familiar with the Gregoire voting scandal, you should know that liberals, and democrats specifically have very little fear of a backlash at the voting booth. If they thought they could get their agenda accomplished by taking it to the People, there wouldn't be a huge impending battle over SC judges. Fiat by judiciary is the only way they can possibly see any of their agenda imposed on Americans, so they plan on fighting tooth and nail any conservative Bush nominates. Yes, both sides will spout melodramatic propaganda and BS, but any reasonable person has to admit the stakes are pretty high. Bush isn't just getting to nominate one judge, there is going to be at least one more, and there are rumors of others stepping down. The SC has been doing some pretty insane stuff recently, not just that Kelo thing, but basing their decisions on international law, as opposed to the Constitution. We NEED conservative/constructionist judges, and the Dem's aren't going to be nice about it.

Excellent post matt...really really good.
and in spite of washington's lack of checks and balances [ie ballot box] washington is not all of america . god help us if the rest of the country were as screwed up as king county.........

Alas, Matt, there is no such thing as a middle-of-the-road Supreme Court Justice. The so-called "swing" Justices of the current Court (O'Connor and Kennedy), like the "swing" members of the 1930s Court (Hughes and Roberts) dart back and forth between ideological blocs in an unpredictable and unprincipled manner.

If you are cynical, this is designed to maximize their own influence within the Court; if you are less cynical, they are trying to promote what they consider desirable public policy. Either way, the results are not very encouraging. The country is now divided over unresolvable moral disputes surrounding racial quotas, abortion, and gay rights in a way that we have not seen since the slavery controversy.

There is probably little the Court can now do to quiet these disputes, other than to stop inflaming them by still more ill advised inerventions.

If the president can strengthen the hand of those on the Court seeking to do this, well and good. If he can do so by placating rather than enraging the largest faction of his own party, so much the better.

In its time, the Court has survived a Jewish seat, a Catholic seat, a female seat, a Southern seat, and a Western seat. If we are now about to create an evengelical Christian seat, I doubt that the foundations of the Republic will be in jeopardy.

To the President: Appoint someone to the SCOTUS with a brain. There are four there now with a major malfunction, five if you count the traitor Souter. We are in dire need of people that go by the constitution which was in effect for almost 225 years. Since several left wing radicals that assume they have the right to make law instead of enforcing it have made their way there by hook and crook and we 'the people' are in deep trouble. The local governments will not protect the right of the people when it comes to 'tax money'. They will sell the people out every time and voting them out will not help. They will make their millions by taking your property and then not care if they are not reelected. It happened within 48 hours of the ruling in my home town. People were fighting the destruction of a neighborhood, but gave up after the ruling. They actually had the fight won, but had to give up since the ruling pulled the pins from under them. Now there will be high rent condo's where single family homes had existed for years.

Since we have a country divided into red and blue states and, indeed, states divided like East and West Washington, I think that we ought to just go ahead and create two different Supreme Courts.

People would be able to choose which set of laws - and interpretation of laws - they want to live under. Most of the controversy relates to one set of people wanting to tell another set of people how to live, what is moral, and how they should live their lives.

Creating two Supreme Courts would solve that problem. And, I think the end result would be that we would find that not many people want to actually live under the laws they would have others live under.