In the aftermath of the ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby (and a few other decisions), there are some who are calling for reform of the Supreme Court.  In May, Norm Ornstein in the Atlantic makes a compelling case for term limits, and links to another Atlantic article by David Paul Kuhn a few years back about the increased polarization of the Supreme Court in recent times.

Norm Ornstein summarizes the situation at the highest court this way:

As politics have become polarized and as two-party competition intensified, control of the courts—which are increasingly making major policy decisions—became more important. With lifetime appointments, a party in power for two or four years could have sway over policy for decades after it left power. But to ensure that sway meant picking judges who were virtual locks to rule the way the party in power wanted. That meant track records in judicial opinions, and that in turn meant choosing sitting judges to move up to the Supreme Court. It also meant choosing younger individuals with more ideology and less seasoning; better to have a justice serving for 30 years or more than for 20 or less.

He concludes:

For more than a decade, I have strongly advocated moving toward term limits for appellate judges and Supreme Court justices. I would like to have single, 18-year terms, staggered so that each president in a term would have two vacancies to fill. Doing so would open opportunities for men and women in their 60s, given modern life expectancies, and not just those in their 40s. It would to some degree lower the temperature on confirmation battles by making the stakes a bit lower. And it would mean a Court that more accurately reflects the changes and judgments of the society.

This makes sense, and if somehow it were to happen, I don't think it would be a bad thing, but rather a positive thing. 

So why am I against reforming the Supreme Court, especially now when it definitely leans in the ideological direction to which I am opposed.  The answer is two fold.

The first is that it would expend a great deal of energy from those who were attempting to make the reform happen. This is the basic opportunity cost argument. Energy spent reforming the Supreme Court is reformist energy not spent elsewhere.

This is not about the amount of pundit time spent bantering their views, since whatever the cause or issue, it is banter which tends to just turn into white noise.  The cause or issue that generates the white noise is irrelevant. If it is not Supreme Court reform, it will be some other conflict of the day.

There are only a few actual reformers, the vast majority of whom work out of the spotlight, from the local to the federal.  There are plenty of things that need to be reformed and the Supreme Court is far down the list.  Well, far down my list.

Which brings me to the second fold of why we should just let the Supreme Court be as it is. Ornstein makes the assertion that a decision such as Brown vs. Board of Education may have still have been decided the way it was (he doubts that), but it would not have been an unanimous conclusion (which took two years to achieve). It would have been like today a 5-4 split.  This would maintain or even intensify the polarization evident in the political parties and the country as whole.

This increase in the polarization of the Supreme Court he feels, and the current lack of term limits he claims:

...we could end up with a Supreme Court dramatically out of step for decades with the larger shape of the society, and likely losing much of its prestige and sense of legitimacy as an impartial arbiter, creating in turn a serious crisis of confidence in the rule of law.

I don't think people see the the Supreme Court as impartial. Not now, and not when they handed down the decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. The polarization of the Court reflects the polarization that has existed in this country for quite some time, a polarization that was really beginning to emerge 60 years ago when Brown was before the court.  In a strange way, the fact that the Supreme Court is as polarized as the rest of the country is actually places more trust in the Supreme Court.  They don't see them as some entities floating above the messy partisan, polarized country handing down decisions, but reflections of what is happening elsewhere - in politics, in business, in the neighborhoods and home life of every American.

The are those mindless debates over how the Constitution should be applied to current laws and decisions, with labels such as "Interpretationalists" and "Originalists" being tossed around. The Supreme Court has always been simultaneously ahead or behind (depending on one's ideological perspective) of the cultural curve and a reflection of the country as it has become over the years.  

In part this has to do with the simple fact that no matter who get appointed and accepted by confirmation is a product of the culture of America, no matter their ideological leaning. While I disagree with much of how someone like Scalia sees the world, I don't believe he is madman -- completely out of touch with what we would agree is reality.

As frustrating as it might be, we live in a polarized country.  We may be well into the second decade of the 21st century, but we are far from harmonious as a nation when it comes to our ideological perspectives on the world. The notion that we can have some body of judicial arbitrators who operate above the fray is not only unrealistic, it is undesirable. 

If one doesn't like decision in the case involving The Hobby Lobby than maybe one should turn one's eyes toward one's neighbors not the Supreme Court. The case before them because there are those in this country whose views about contraception et al. are vastly different than yours. Some of them happen to run companies and, like all of us, want what is ours to reflect and align with who we are.  

The reform is at a cultural level.  This is a little more messy and vastly far more complicated to wrap one's mind around, then, say, setting term limits on the Supreme Court justices.  But it is this cultural reform that will ultimately reflect itself in political polarization, and, in the end, the polarization of the courts.