The most important question we should be asking about the next Supreme Court appointee is whether the appointment will begin to correct the extreme right-wing bias of the current Court. Will the nominee help return the Court to some semblance of philosophical balance that reflects the clear preferences expressed by voters in the last two elections?

But our media is not covering this nomination as though this is the fundamental issue at stake. Instead, we’ve had an unbroken week dominated by dishonest, malicious and distracting Republican talking points: "Is she racist," the racists ask? "Would she take her ethnic heritage and gender into count" the frightened white men ask? And equally absurd, would she, heaven forbid, be an "activist" judge, someone who tried to "make policy?"

How did our political discourse get to be so stupid?

Hint to our media: one of the principal reasons we have appellate courts and a Supreme Court is precisely because every society needs a non-violent, respected, final arbiter of law and policy when the legislative and/or executive branches have left law and policy debatable [as in unresolved, ambiguous, ill-defined] or when they’ve adopted measures that violate fundamental liberties and broader Constitutional principles. When addressing these situations, appellate judges make law; they make policy, and if they didn’t, we’d have to invent new institutions to perform those essential functions.

The question is, what do we want the law and public policy to be? What kinds of legal/policy makers do we want on our highest courts, given the fact the legislative and exeuctive branches always leave unsettled matters in particular cases and always leave disputes that require a final arbiter? It’s the Court’s job to decide these questions.

After 30 plus years of mostly conservative rule, we now have a Supreme Court (and many appellate courts) that have become extremist, radical in their law/policy-making. There’s no other way to describe the current Supreme Court.

You can measure that extremism by historical standards (e.g., compared to the Court of the 1940s or the 1960s-70s) or measure it against the voters’ thorough rejection of the conservative ideologues in the last two elections. Or you can note the fact that the current extremely activist court has had no qualms about overruling and undermining dozens of long-help judicial principles and precedents. Every principle has been up for grabs, if the extremists wanted to overrule it. We have an extreme, radical right wing Court in desperate need of rebalancing.

Given its willingness to overturn long-held precedents, the current Court is often a rogue branch out of control, just as the Bush Administration was out of control when it discarded long-held principles of executive behavior. Why would we assume that this was only a problem of a rogue executive branch and dysfunctional Congress? The problem pervades and corrupts the entire federal governmental structure, and through the accumulation of life-time appointments, the most extreme branch is now the judiciary.

All too often, whenever Scalia, Alito, Roberts and Thomas convince Kennedy to join them against the remaining Justices, the prevailing majority almost always favors corporate interests over consumer/citizen interests, polluters over environmental protection, protection of wealth and privilege against the rights or needs of the broader public and siding with expansions of executive power and governmental intrusion over the liberty and privacy of its citizens.

A strong majority of the current Court was appointed by Presidents who embrace those same un-constitutional biases against the public interest. But the voters have now soundly rejected that governing philosophy, because it crippled the government’s abilty to protect the public, nearly destroyed the economy, undermined the rule of law and compromised the societal compact citizens once had with their government.

Key pieces of the Constitution have been (and continue to be) shredded, and the basic principle of accountability, so essential to a democratic society, is on life support. We need new Justices who will act strongly to reverse these damaging trends.

Measured against what we need, the current media coverage, focused on the false standards of "activism" or "making policy," and distracted by smears and lies about Justice Sonia Sotomayor, is a profound disservice to the American people. Our media simply needs to do better.

Those who view the Supreme Court as perhaps the most extreme example of the damaging and dysfunctional ideology of the conservative right’s jihad against governance were hoping for a nominee who would begin to reverse the damage the current Court has inflicted on the law and on the principles of democratic governance. Those who supported that damaging philosophy feared that would be the case. That is what the real debate is about, but the media is not covering this obvious point and should be embarrassed, again, for not doing its job.