About John Ryder's response . . .

I appreciate John Ryder's thoughtful response to my critique of his recent op/ed. You can read it here.
John, I hope you'll forgive me for concluding from your op/ed that you're "down" with "merit selection"--at least "merit selection" that results in appointees that represent your particular views. But your reply raises a couple issues.

First, just because a Supreme Court has ruled a certain way doesn't make it so. The Dred Scott decision of the U.S. Supreme Court is the classic, ConLaw 101 example. I think Tennesseans are able to understand what the Tennessee Constitution means by "elected," and it takes a bunch of lawyers to find a way around that meaning.

But there's an important part to that second sentence in Art. VI, Sec. 3 that John neglected to include: "The Legislature shall have power to prescribe such rules as may be necessary to carry out the provisions of section two of this article" (emphasis added) . . . the Constitution gave the Legislature authority to prescribe rules related to jurisdiction, how to make sure that judges were representative of the three grand divisions, etc. not whether a supreme court justice was entitled to never have to face an opponent in an "election."

Likewise, the Constitution doesn't contemplate that "election" of legislators and the governor could later be interpreted to include an uncontested referendum after appointment by a commission. But you never know what might happen if we gave the legislature free rein to come up with whatever definition of "election" suited them . . .