Just admit it: The Supreme Court is political 

Writing about the Supreme Court almost 50 years ago, famed political scientist Robert Dahl said that “To consider the Supreme Court of the United States strictly as a legal institution is to underestimate its significance in the American political system. For it is also a political institution. … As a political institution, the court is highly unusual, not least because Americans are not quite willing to accept the fact that it is a political institution and not quite capable of denying it.”

The result, Dahl argued, is “that frequently we take both positions at once.”  

But a poll released just last month suggests that Americans may be coming off the fence in their views of the Supreme Court. More than half of Americans disapprove of the court’s job performance, and 46 percent favors Trump administration policies “based on ideology rather than the law.”

The Supreme Court has dug itself into a hole, and it just keeps digging. This country cannot afford a high court that is partisan, nor can it afford justices who keep telling the public to ignore the fact that they are among the most political in our history.  

The current court ranks with the Taney Court (1836-1864), which gave us the Dred Scott decision that helped bring about the Civil War, and the 1930s Supreme Court, whose consistent rulings against Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal precipitated a constitutional crisis. That’s not the kind of company any court should want to be in.  

On June 29, after the court gave the president the authority to fire members........

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