Eight Supreme Court Justices: The New Normal?

Senate Republicans are setting a disturbing precedent on protracted vacancies on the nation’s highest court by obstructing the confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice, Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe and attorney Joshua Matz write. “It is in vogue to treat this term as a one-off,” Tribe and Matz write in the Washington Post. “But when ‘exceptional’ circumstances endure long enough, advance powerful political interests and are tolerated by the public, they can easily become the new normal.” And with the Supreme Court striving to find consensus and avoid challenging rulings while it waits for a new member, other problems arise, like lower courts becoming more aggressive. “When the justices are limited by obstructionism rather than by a consensus favoring restraint, thunderbolts may cease on the mountaintop only to intensify on the hills below,” Tribe and Matz write. “[P]aralysis does not equal restraint. Nor does it achieve any other worthy constitutional goal.”