President Biden has traditionally been wary of reforming the Supreme Court. He even ignored his own presidential commission’s modest proposals for improving the court’s transparency and ethics. Nonetheless, on Monday, Biden proposed imposing 18-year term limits for justices and a binding ethics code.

Sadly, this new initiative is not going to be one of the great successes of Biden’s presidency. Supreme Court reform is a contentious issue. Having spent years and enormous political capital working the court into its current shape, Republicans have little interest in reform and have already tagged his proposal as “dead on arrival.” And institutionalists of all political persuasions — including myself — are cautious about engaging in what may be populist tampering with what has been a cornerstone of American democracy.

But all that is going to change.

Few people realize it yet, but the Supreme Court is now one of the walking dead, a zombie institution, shuffling along until so many bits fall off that it becomes incapacitated. It may seem healthy enough now, but the rot has already set in.

The court faces multiple, interlocking problems. For one, justices can only be confirmed when the same party controls both the presidency and the Senate. Though there is no formal rule in the Constitution stating this, there might as well be. What........

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