US top court in political wars post RBG death

Bloomberg

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s (RBG) death has pulled the US Supreme Court deep into the nation’s bitter political wars, threatening lasting damage to the reputation of a governmental branch that has struggled to remain above the partisan fray.
President Donald Trump and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell are vowing to fill the seat despite the impending election. Outraged Democrats are now talking about drastic measures should they gain control of the Senate and the White House in November, with some even musing openly about an historic upheaval to the court’s makeup — adding seats to the nine-member bench to dilute the conservative majority.
That hasn’t been seriously discussed since President Franklin Roosevelt unsuccessfully pitched a court-packing plan to Congress in 1937. The fact that it’s even being mentioned shows the high court is entering a dangerous new phase of turmoil.
“If Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans move forward with this, then nothing is off the table for next year,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told fellow Democrats according to a person familiar with the matter.
The outcome could be messy. Trump could nominate a justice, lose the
November 3 election to Democrat Joe Biden, and then see his nominee confirmed by a lame-duck Senate. And if Democrats take control of the Senate, many of the very senators voting to confirm Trump’s choice already would have been thrown out of office by the voters.
The upshot could be lasting damage to the court’s reputation and its role in American democracy at a time when both parties are already nursing grudges stemming from Trump’s previous two nominations.
“It’s a difficult time and a very perilous time I think for the court in its legitimacy,” said Barbara Perry, a presidential and Supreme Court scholar at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
The imbroglio could overwhelm Chief Justice John Roberts’s efforts to protect the court’s institutional standing. The Republican-appointed Roberts has long fought the perception of the court as a political body, insisting that judges are akin to neutral baseball umpires and pushing back against Trump when the president criticised an “Obama judge.”
Roberts has also softened the impact of Trump’s two appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
In recent years Roberts sided with the liberal wing in a handful of major cases, including an abortion case this year, and resisted his conservative colleagues’ calls to resolve more divisive issues, such as gun rights.
Roberts’s efforts have borne some success so far.