I was just wondering what you thought about the possibility of varying and different backgrounds and what that might bring to the court, if anything. I think we’ve got a very varied court as it is. You’ve got nine different justices from all over the country — well, the Acela corridor may be overrepresented, slightly. Slightly overrepresented, appointed by five different presidents over 30 years. And some of us are originalists, and some of us are very much not, OK. But yet we’re able to talk to one another and listen to one another and find common ground a surprising amount of the time. I mean, 40 percent of our cases we decide unanimously. You give us the 70 hardest cases in the country every year. I mean where a lower court judge has disagreed, and we’re able to reach unanimity that much. I think that’s a miracle. And a third, maybe a third of our cases are 5-4, 6-3. But only half of those are the 5-4 or 6-3s you might be thinking about. And then you compare those numbers back to 1945, when Roosevelt had appointed eight of the nine justices, And the figures are the same today as they were then. And when I think about that, and the diversity of the court was different then than it is now, it does remind me, in going back to the men at the Declaration or at the Constitutional Convention, coming from around the country with different perspectives, different voices, the rabble rousers from Massachusetts, the folks down in South Carolina were not sure at all about this project, and they debated and they disagreed. And it shows you that people from different perspectives, different walks of life, along whatever axis, can, when they listen to one another and work together in good faith and assume that the guy across from me loves this country every bit as much as I do, great things can happen.
