For many decades, Americans regarded the Supreme Court as a place largely above the dirty business of politics. The elevated status of the justices has always reminded me a bit of ancient Rome's Vestal Virgins, a small group of young women from patrician backgrounds who, for a tenure of 30 years, tended to the sacred fire of Rome. They existed as living symbols of aspirational piety and duty who were buried alive if they fell down on their main job of maidenhood. If the American imagination has anything close to a cadre of cloistered cultists who stoke the eternal flame of freedom while living apart from the society they serve, it is the Supreme Court's nine justices. (One of whom says he remained a virgin in high school and “for many years after.”)
The Virgins, though, had term limits. Supreme Court justices do not. And these days, many liberals feel the the court doesn't live above the partisan fray. Currently, only 38 percent of Democrats approve of the Supreme Court, compared to 72 percent of Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's stonewalling of President Obama's court nominee, Merrick Garland, was the beginning of a drama that spurred Democrats' latest disillusionment with the Supreme Court. President Trump's appointment of two young — well, more like “young” — conservative judges, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, seems to have unleashed an urgent strain of thought in some liberal circles: The court is broken and it needs fixing.
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