So, there’s nothing particularly special or elevated or delightsome about the United States Supreme Court. Nor is there anything sacrosanct — or mandatory — or obviously preferable — about the present composition of the Nine Riders cloaked in black. For all I know, it might be better some other way than the way it is right now. As we’ve all heard a million times now, the U.S. Constitution doesn’t say anything in particular about that,[] and historically Congress has expanded, and has clipped, the nose-count of the court, on more than one occasion. The reasons for doing so pretty much every time were political, and indeed part of a fairly nakedly partisan power-grab, by temporarily triumphant Congressional factions or by long-frustrated Congressional majorities.[]
Now there are plenty of righteous reasons why political Progressives have gotten so furious and ended up feeling so utterly, desperately frustrated over the last few years. There are some stupid and invidious reasons too, but that’s hardly the point. Even if every Progressive political demand is legitimate, just and wise in its substance, — whether a faction is wrong-headed or right-on, under the circumstances or in general, — still, the fact is, in a partisan political order, it is almost always going to be pretty grubby, and short-sighted, and dangerous, and really very destructive, to govern as if your own faction or political party is just never going to lose another election, nor ever wish, on some future day, that you all had abided some hindrances to the government’s power to ride roughshod over opposition, or had some remnant left of conventional restraints on the momentarily triumphant faction’s naked wielding of political power.[][]