Patton was the Democratic governor of Kentucky from 1995 to 2003 and has been chancellor of the University of Pikeville for seven years.
Our very wise Founders established a method for the people to have a direct way to be involved in the selection of our president and our Congress. Then they provided for the two of them to select our federal judiciary. That worked well for almost 200 years. It is failing us now.
There are a few hot-button social issues about which this nation is passionate and divided. Among these are abortion rights, gun rights, gay rights and the separation of church and state. All these issues have and may still come before the Supreme Court. They are all important issues that impact people in very serious ways, but the future of the nation does not depend on them. The important issues that threaten the nation are the national debt, the economy, the federal budget, crime, defense, healthcare and Social Security — things that affect all of our lives every day.
The nation is so divided that we cannot make a rational decision on these important issues.
A major reason is the selection of the federal judiciary. It seems many people vote on these issues, even when they disagree with their preferred candidate on other, more important issues. His stated opposition to abortion was crucial to Donald Trump's election four years ago.
Justices on the high court, and judges on the federal appeals and trial courts, are now selected by presidents mainly because they are either a liberal or a conservative. We now have a Supreme Court with five reliable conservatives, three reliable liberals and one not always reliable conservative. We should have courts where personal beliefs are not an issue. Judges should not be known as liberals or conservatives. Judges and justices should not be selected based on their social beliefs, but instead on their demonstrated willingness to decide issues based on the Constitution and federal law.
This is a national crisis. Article III of the Constitution is obsolete. The only solution is to remove the involvement of the two other branches of the federal government in populating the third branch.
The Constitution makes one of the most important parts of our system of government, the privately owned free press, a bedrock of our system, not beholden to the two elected branches, but rather the watchdog of those two branches. Genius. It has worked pretty well. A lot of misinformation is out there but enough rebuttal is available to permit concerned citizens to discern the truth.
We need to do the same with the federal court system. Turn it over to the American Bar Association. This voluntary organization's members are educated, by and large ethical, and representative of the people. There are about 1.3 million licensed attorneys in the United States. They can protect the people of the nation as well as the free press can. Let's trust them.
I propose the federal judiciary be a career path for young lawyers to pursue. There are now 94 trial court districts with 667 judges and 13 courts of appeal with 167 judges. There is one Supreme Court with nine justices — for now. This is at least 843 highly compensated and secure positions for ambitious and talented young attorneys to aspire to. The courts will continue to expand. There will be more judicial positions in the future.
I propose that the district judges be selected by the licensed attorneys who practice in that district, using secret ballots to select among all qualified attorneys who apply for each vacancy. I would have runoffs between the top two finishers — who would have to be 35 years old with five years of experience as a trial attorney. They could serve until they turned 65 and have retirement benefits for life.
Circuit appeals court judges, in turn, would be similarly selected — but by the district judges in the relevant circuits, choosing from trial court colleagues who want the job. These judges would need to be at least 40 and have been on the bench at least five years when they're promoted, and would have to step aside at age 70.
One proposal for expanding the Supreme Court calls for increasing it to 17 justices and having cases reviewed by subgroups of them but subject to a discretionary later hearing by the full court — the general practice on the appeals courts now. Sounds like a good idea to me.
The eight new justices, and replacements for the current nine, would be selected by all the lower court judges. Judges with at least five years on an appeals court could apply. The top two finishers in the first round of voting would go on to a runoff, and the winner could serve until age 75.
There are about 8,000 new cases filed in the Supreme Court each year. It hears about 80 of them (1 percent, in other words) and disposes of about 100 more without full review. So there are many cases that someone thinks is worth spending a lot of money on but which don't get a fair hearing. This proposal would allow many more cases to get at least an initial high court review.
This will be seen as stacking the court, but changes like this only occur during times of crisis. We have a crisis about selecting judges and justices — and it is destroying the ability of the nation to come together on a lot of other, very serious issues.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.