HOWARD BASHMAN ARGUES IN SLATE that the Supreme Court shouldn’t follow polls. He’s right, of course.

But there’s more to it than that. As I argued in a (probably over-sophisticated) article in the Columbia Law Review entitled “Chaos and the Court” some years ago, one of the virtues of the Court, entirely apart from whether it gets things right on the merits, is that its institutional structure keeps it running on different political cycles than the rest of the government. If the court starts paying attention to polls, we lose that feature, as well as acquiring all the vices that go with poll-following on the merits.