THE “LEAST POLITICAL BRANCH” NO MORE: Andrew McCarthy: Let’s Drop the Charade: The Supreme Court is a Political Branch, Not a Judicial One.

Already, an ocean of ink has been spilled analyzing, lauding, and bemoaning the Supreme Court’s work this week: a second life line tossed to SCOTUScare in just three years; the location of a heretofore unknown constitutional right to same-sex marriage almost a century-and-a-half after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment; and the refashioning of Congress’s Fair Housing Act to embrace legal academe’s loopy “disparate impact” theory of inducing discrimination.

Yet, for all the non-stop commentary, one detail goes nearly unmentioned — the omission that best explains this week’s Fundamental Transformation trifecta.   Did you notice that there was not an iota of speculation about how the four Progressive justices would vote?There was never a shadow of a doubt. In the plethora of opinions generated by these three cases, there is not a single one authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, or Sonia Sotomayor. There was no need. They are the Left’s voting bloc. There was a better chance that the sun would not rise this morning than that any of them would wander off the reservation.

McCarthy’s right. Leftists believe that “law is politics,” so they’re not particularly interested in how they get there: What matters, to the political left, is simply getting there.  The ends justify the means. 

Given this reality, proposals to reform the Supreme Court–to make it more politically accountable–are becoming increasingly attractive to conservatives.  If Justices are going to act like politicians in robes, they ought to be more politically accountable to the people. Any of the proposals being floated–such as Senator Cruz’s proposal for Supreme Court retention elections, or perhaps term limits–would require a constitutional amendment.

Americans haven’t ratified any “new” amendments (and here I am excluding the 27th Amendment, which was proposed by Madison with the original Bill of Rights, but not ratified until 1992) since the 26th Amendment gave 18 year-olds the right to vote, back in 1971.  We the People haven’t been very constitutionally active in my lifetime, and maybe it’s time to change that, as there are numerous important constitutional changes now worth considering.