Because they are generally appointed by politicians, making them inherently political appointees.
And in the places they aren’t appointed by politicians, they run for office themselves.
I don’t necessarily agree with this. I think any process to appoint justices is going to be vulnerable to politicization. Even the best case scenario, an independent body appointing them, is vulnerable to political capture or pressure from a polarized public. No, I think the reason America’s courts have become political is merely a byproduct of extreme polarization. Politicians don’t need to be polarized. In our country since the 80’s this has been the case, but there was a time when opposing views were able to cooperate and find more common ground. This polarization is new and it bleeding over into the courts was all but inevitable.
I had a long, researched response to that was ruined by the back button.
The gist of it was Republicans do need polarization to be politically effective. In 1995, they took the House and stayed there. But before that, it was 4 decades since they’d been in control of the House. The story is kinda similar for the Senate, as you’ll see.
In any case, Newt Gingrich in 1995 showed up with his Language: A Key Mechanism of Control. And it’s effectiveness has proven itself over and over and over. Now you have headlines like The Biden Clan’s Con Is Coming to an End coming from a longstanding prestigious conservative think tank:
I think Republicans only “need” polarization because they decided they needed it. There’s a world out there where Republicans took a more sincere path since the 80’s and didn’t create the “culture wars” and divisive rhetorical approach to politics that people like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh invented. I don’t believe that they would in fact need to feed on polarization to succeed if they actually chose to address issues by suggesting actual solutions to problems instead of scaring their base on non-issues with hate and fear.
The problem with cooperating and finding ground is that, in a lot of cases now, the two sides either have views that aren’t just reflective of different values, but different beliefs about what is and isn’t objective reality. (For example, abortion. The people who want to ban it claim that they believe fetuses are people, and therefore that abortion is murder, meanwhile, a pro-choice position would generally hold that this is not the case, and since pregnancy can be quite dangerous and complications can kill, a ban or restriction on it is effectively condemning people to death, plus of course the ethical problems of forcing people to have children they do not want or cannot afford when the technology to avoid that exists. A “compromise” position there, say, some incomplete restrictions that make it illegal in roughly half of circumstances, would be one where both sides would see a lot of people die needlessly with a significant loss of human rights on top of that, which obviously would be acceptable to neither. Fundamentally, the issue there is a question of when personhood starts, which is a question about the nature of reality more than of values.)
In some cases, issues revolve around matters where the stakes are too high to compromise (for example, LGBTQ people cannot reasonably be expected to compromise with homophobic people, when ultimately, the desire of the latter is for the former to simply not exist, and for that matter, it would be unreasonable for anyone else to support restricting human rights for those people simply because it’s some kind of “middle ground”)
Finally, on some issues, one side will simply take the position of “All I want is the opposite of whatever the other guys want”, which obviously leads to a middle ground being simply logically impossible to construct.
In a case where you have two sides with views this different, where each often views the other as not just having a different view, but as evil, or at least fundamentally wrong about matters that are sometimes life and feath, satisfactory compromise is usually not possible. The only remaining option is to try to defeat the other side, to try to render them politically irrelevant. And if both sides are trying to do that, then every source of political power logically must become polarized, because neither can afford to pass up any sort of political power that might be used to restrict the agenda of the other.
To be clear, I blame Republicans for our polarization completely. Democrats have been compromising to their detriment for decades while Republicans have taken advantage of every loophole they’ve been able to leverage in their favor. Republicans have also doubled down on the politics of hate and fear to motivate their base instead of using anything actually based in reality that might genuinely help people.
In 2012, when Romney lost, the Republican party created a committee to investigate what steps their party needed to take in order to succeed. The answer the committee came back with was “we need to stop being racist and sexist and focus on more inclusive policies”. Trump was a sound rejection of that direction. I still believe that once Republicans have lost another election or two, they’re going to be forced to face reality finally and listen to that committee.
Edit: This is the committee I was referencing. The so called “RNC autopsy”.
