The Supreme Court

I'm sympathetic to Megan McArdle and Ross Douthat's criticisms of this Cass Sunstein article about the shifting philosophical bent of the Supreme Court. Whether the court's metamorphosis was presaged by a the political drift of the country as a whole is, I'd say, an enormously complicated question. Less complicated, though, is the fact that, since 1980, we've had about 18 years worth of Republican presidents and only eight of Democratic presidents and that the conservatives appointed in that timespan have been substantially more conservative than have been the liberals. So the court change.

Disclosure: I'm no Supreme Court expert. In fact, whatever the opposite of a Supreme Court expert is--that's what I am. But it does seem to me that an unusual harmony has emerged between the Republican party's national governance and conservative jurisprudence on the Court. This could all be an enormous coincidence--it could be the case that the Republican party legislates exactly as conservative legal scholars would counsel them to legislate. But I think it's more likely the case that the conservatives on the court are torturing their legal thinking to buttress Republican lawmaking.