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Notes -
Well, I was more interested in kind of "situating" the justices, it was not my intent to be deliberately unflattering or anything.
But I do wonder whether it's actually a "poor bar." Scalia was an exceptionally capable jurist, but he does have peers in the profession--and even peers outside the profession who would likely make excellent justices. The problem is that the political nature of the appointment now often prevents such people from being appointed. In particular, Robert Bork was a much better choice than Anthony Kennedy, for example, and given Kennedy's penchant, especially in his later years, for flights of poetic fancy instead of hard-boiled legal reasoning, America would very likely be a better place today had Bork joined the court.
That said, though, while I do think it's still a little early to declare that either Gorsuch or Barrett are on Scalia's level, they are at least plausibly in the neighborhood. So it's not impossible to get good jurists on the court. But in the case of Jackson, President Biden didn't even try. He wasn't looking for a great jurist or even an obviously competent one. He made a purely political, explicitly affirmative-action pick, with totally predictable results.
That's a fair analysis. KBJ is certainly the weakest justice in terms of quality of writing and scholarship on the court right now, though purely out of the interest of charity I'd like to think that with time she'll at least get to the level of say, Alito. Not the greatest writer ever by any means, but competent. Of course "competent" by the standards of the Supreme Court is still head-and-shoulders above "competent" by the standards of the rest of the judiciary, so we'll see.
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