I am not a lawyer or a professional working in the legal arena. That said, I've had the distinct impression since Bush v. Gore, that the Supreme Court has become dangerously predictable in their decisions. A study published recently (I wish I could retrieve the exact reference) suggested that a SC judgementcan be predicted with a > 80% accuracy if the parameters guiding their decision answered the question: "How would a very conservative republican would want this case to be decided?"

Call me naive but reading the Constitution, I cannot find any suggestion that the Founding Fathers wanted or mandated a particular political ideology to be the Prime Directive guiding the Supreme Court's work.

Moreover, since when a Supreme Court appointee must be a judge? Where does this groupthink about the necessity of being a legal professional to become a SCJ come from? Is it because politicians and "special interests groups" (give me a moment to reach the airbag please) want to have written records of the candidate thinking (and prejudices) to measure potential acceptability to their ideology?

Finally a practical question for the group: Could the next President expand the number of Supreme Court Justices in an effort to dilute the ideological polarization and speed up resolution of their workload? Has it been done before?

Thank you

I'm surprised it is only 80% predictability. The R's goal is 100% predictability. As to expanding the court, FDR tried to "pack" the court with people to his liking. He wanted to increase the total number. Got shot down.

That 80%-accuracy-prediction statistic sounds about right, and the reason it’s not nearly 100% is that (I suspect) about 20% of the time Justice Kennedy joins with the four moderates.

A large swath of the public would blanche if they knew the specifics of the Court’s holdings in cases that don’t concern, say, abortion or affirmative action or the one or two other culture-wars issues that comprise the total of what the general news media covers and what the public knows about the Court’s actions.

I support Obama over Clinton as the Democratic nominee because I think he could, and actually might decide to, competently discuss some of the Court’s recent decisions—including decisions regarding what cases to hear at all, and upon whose request the Court decided to hear or to not hear the particular case—that expose the current Court as stunningly elitist, demeaning and condescending to and about the non-wealthy and the non-graduate-school-educated, and as rubber stamps of business interests and of the state and federal governments.

As for whether or not the next president (along with the Congress) could expand the number of justices, the answer is that the Constitution does not bar it but that as a practical matter it would be exceedingly hard to do.

An option that I think could succeed, though, is the creation of an entirely new level of federal appellate court—one that would hear cases from throughout the country (that is, from each of the 13 lower federal courts of appeals (knows as the federal circuit courts)—and that, unlike the Supreme Court, would act both as a court that makes law and also as a court of general appellate review and correction. The Supreme Court, as the justices themselves openly acknowledge, functions only in the former role, even though Republicans regularly tell the public that the opposite is true.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court would have the final word, to the extent that it wishes to have the final word—just as it does now. But the Supreme Court would be faced with far more public knowledge of the issues in the cases it decides to hear—and the breadth of the implications of these legal issues—because the national court of appeals would itself (presumably) gain news-media attention.

So it would become clear to much of the public that a majority of the Supreme Court justices are rightwing robots masquerading as wizards of Oz. An intermediate national court of appeals, coupled with media coverage of it, would serve as Toto, pulling back the curtain from in front of these hubristic political hacks.

Grosmec:

and only the monied, corporations, and those suing the gov and other important interests get to that level.

Someone suggested a few years ago that a new justice steeped in international business would be an excellent choice with the new globalism and WTO interference. I think it is time to have someone on board to address those issues as well.