The Hill News

There is a vision fixed in the mind of power that America is a North/South country and the rest over there is just bushes. And of the two, the North is superior, as per the conquest of 1865 and the conditions of surrender at Appomattox. It is a purely colonial vestige that has injured our progress as a nation and injured especially national institutions like the Army, the Foreign Service and the Supreme Court.

We have, since Reagan, since Carter, even since Watergate, when Tennessee’s Sen. Howard Baker and the venerable North Carolinian Sam Irvin rose as folk heroes, culturally and politically awakened west of the New River, yet the Supreme Court today looks like something cobbled together around 1865: all from Harvard and Yale, most from New York or the Northeast. Some few friends of politicians. (Could we see those law board scores again, please?) I guess U. Michigan, U. Texas, Vanderbilt or Washington U. grads are just too rusticated to be Supremes. But youth wants to know: How exactly do you graduate from Yale Law School and flunk the D.C. bar exam? And after that get to be secretary of State? Friend of Bill is what. Helps to join the Supremes as well.

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