If highly educated and respectable men can’t agree on the meaning of holy texts, as has been going on for millennia, I’m not sure why we’re so dumbfounded the same phenomenon happens with a constitution, laws, and regulations written by men.
Everything else being equal (age, education, intelligence, etc) two duplicate judges can arrive at different conclusions based on how they view constitutional interpretation. I.e an originalist vs. a textualist.
The constitution is relatively short, and silent about a lot of things (which is ideal I think). But the result is a good amount of gray area. Or at least enough gray area for highly educated and respectable people to disagree about those gray areas. That’s why we need a scotus. Or why nobody can offer a preferable alternative (imo).
ETA: yes, judges do find ways to manufacture gray areas. Both “sides” have done that, but the left justices more so. Substantive due process, for example, is a sham. I won’t even try to defend that artifice.
All of this stuff is about control. When the government provides and decides about everything we have, they can take away anything we have to keep us in line. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
In today’s NY Times, there is a big article about Clarence Thomas. "As he argued from the bench in his concurrence to the recent decision striking down affirmative action, the court should be “focusing on individuals as individuals,” rather than on the view that Americans are “all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society.”
Where is any of that in the Constitution? We have been duped.