How America’s Supreme Court became so politicised

citing Scalia’s belief that “in the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.”

.. Another worry about the new court is that it may be too deferential to executive power. Mr Kavanaugh, who spent years working for the independent counsel’s team that investigated Bill Clinton in the mid 1990s, later decided such investigations impinged unreasonably on a president’s time and attention. During a panel discussion in 1998 he indicated that the law protects a sitting president from indictment. In a 2009 law-review article, he proposed that Congress pass a law protecting presidents from criminal investigations and civil suits while they were in office.

.. Eric Segall of Georgia State University, the author of a forthcoming book on originalism, worry that originalist language is often used by justices to uphold positions quite at odds with the philosophy’s seemingly hands-off tenets. “Justices use the rhetoric of originalism to mask political judgment,” Mr Segall says. Past proponents of originalism argued that courts should strike down laws only in the case of clear textual error. Today, argues Mr Segall, proponents of originalism want to “shrink the federal government and deregulate the economy, but there is no reasonable originalist argument for that kind of strong judicial interference with our political system.”

.. Mr Roberts who has four justices to his left and four to his right. Though he is without doubt a man of the right, he also evinces caution and a sense of constitutional propriety. He voted twice with the court’s liberal bloc to uphold Mr Obama’s Affordable Care Act, in part, perhaps, because he felt that the court should not throw out a major piece of legislation for which the president had a clear mandate.

..  Two of the court’s liberals are in their eighties; if one dies, or is forced by ill health to retire, before the next election, and Mr Trump were to fill the void, the median position might well move rightward to Mr Gorsuch, hardening the court’s ideological tenor.

.. Brian Fallon, chief spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, recently started Demand Justice, a court-focused pressure group. He wants his party to be as ruthless and court-focused as the Republicans have been. Democrats, he says, need to “get over the idea that the courts are anything other than a place where a power struggle is taking place.” If another seat does come up soon, and if the Democrats retake the Senate in this year’s elections, they will probably stonewall Mr Trump’s nominee, just as Mr McConnell did Mr Obama’s.

.. With ample justification, Democrats want revenge for the theft of Mr Garland’s seat, and how it paved the way for Mr Trump’s ascent to the White House. Faced with a conservative court that could frustrate their ambitions for decades, some have begun whispering about court packing—adding justices to the court should they retake Congress and the White House. No doubt that will outrage Republicans, and lead them to do the same the next time power swings back. Both sides will prize ideological purity over competence and independence of mind.

Down this path lies the dark day when another part of the government takes the decisive, perhaps irretrievable, step of ignoring a Supreme Court ruling. And at that point the constitution’s checks and balances come tumbling down.