Is a mega-Supreme Court an idea whose time has come?

Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today,

...we’ve come to a place where the Supreme Court doesn’t just decide technical legal issues, but is called on to decide some of our most pressing moral and social questions. If the court is going to remain in that role, then it needs to be more representative of America as a whole, and less sensitive to minor changes that produce major shifts in its decisions. (And the near-universal belief that replacing Anthony Kennedy with a conservative will produce such a major shift is also an admission that the Supreme Court today isn’t about legal rigor or “neutral principles,” but essentially about politics.)

So forget 15 justices. Let’s keep the nine we have who are appointed by the president, and add one from each state, to be appointed by governors, and then confirmed by the Senate. Fifty-nine justices is enough to ensure (I hope) that they aren’t all from Harvard and Yale as is the case now, and enough to limit the mystique of any particular justice. If the Supreme Court is going to function, as it does, like a super-legislature, it might as well be legislature-sized.

Making the Supreme Court less sensitive to shifts in the political winds would also benefit presidential and senatorial elections. Right now, they turn significantly on who will be appointed and confirmed to the Supreme Court. If that’s less of an issue, then voters can evaluate candidates on how they’re likely to do their own jobs, rather than who they’ll support for a different one.

Is a mega-Supreme Court an idea whose time has come? If so, we can thank those who put the issue on the table.

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