The Supreme Court recently took a case from Arizona in which a state initiative was used to create an independent commission for designing legislative district's.
This is of concern to me because a similar initiative created a similar commission in California. Except that the California commission was made up of 15 randomly selected people from three categories of partisanship. I have a stake in any random process because that is the future of legislative bodies. It comes from my book A Citizen Legislature.
The problem the Supreme Court is dealing with is that the Constitution specifically names legislatures at the state level as the entities that choose legislators and decide the way they are selected.
This forces me to deal with my evaluation of how the Supreme Court functions.
* Some originalists require an interpretation that uses the original meaning and intent of the words in the Constitution for current issues.
* Others look at the way that the same wording would be interpreted in contemporary circumstances.
* And still others, who are not in my favor, feel the Constitution should be adjusted to the times.
This presents a specific challenge to me that is not covered by any of these models. The use of random selection was not one of the options for creating representation in 1786. While it had existed in ancient Athens it was not perceived as relevant to the Constitutional Convention. They were much more familiar with voting elections as were common in England and Holland.
They also didn't know about popular initiatives as a way to represent the electorate.
So we have something new that is a much better source of ‘representation’ and would've been welcomed by the Constitutional Convention because of it's better representational qualities. But that option didn't exist.
So how do we interpret a value that was held by members of the Constitutional convention, true representation, that is now used differently in contemporary society?