I am shaking my head at the ahistorical myopia of opinion polls. A recent survey found that only 44 percent of Americans approve of job the U.S. Supreme Court is doing, down from 60 percent for most of the past 30 years. The most common explanation is that the decline is a reaction to an increasingly divided and partisan court a clever theory that lacks only the virtue of an accurate premise. In fact, all of this sturm und drang is nothing more than manufactured dissatisfaction.
The sudden clamor over Citizens United (and, 12 years ago, Bush v. Gore) notwithstanding, the Supreme Court is, and always has been, an instrument of political, social and economic change. The neat little analogy, most recently trotted out by Chief Justice John Roberts at his confirmation hearings, is a fiction: The justices are not umpires; they are players. And quite often, they are playing for different teams. The difference now is that both Democrats and Republicans have decided they can score points with their respective constituencies by making the court a political piñata.
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