TV Guidance asked Homer Simpson, longtime U.S. Supreme Court watcher and father of future Supreme Court Chief Justice Bart Simpson, what he thought of the announcement that Justice David Souter will retire at the end of this term.

Souter is, by the way, another example of how the U.S. political parties have become more polarized in the last couple of decades: he was a New Hampshire Republican, appointed by a Republican president at the recommendation of other New Hampshire Republicans, but he immediately turned out to be a liberal Republican of the type once common to New England. (Probably the most liberal justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Methuselah-aged John Paul Stevens, was a Republican appointee as well.) Since that time, most of the liberal Republicans in New Hampshire have become Democrats — possibly including Souter himself, since he waited to retire until a Democrat was in the White House — as the two parties have split more clearly on ideological lines.