The next Supreme Court justice should be a model of judicial restraint

As the U.S. heads for a protracted impasse in the Senate over filling the seat of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, I have reached a reluctant, even tortured conclusion. It is time for everyone — liberals and conservatives — to drink a little bit of poison and support the selection of a new justice who sees the court's role in a far narrower way than anyone currently sitting, whether they're on the left or the right — someone who will reintroduce a more limited style of decisionmaking.

In effect, we need a court more inclined to retreat than advance into political disputes, as was the case in the late 1930s when Justice Owen Roberts, the swing vote at the time, adopted a more accommodating attitude to New Deal legislation. No matter how unpalatable and even unrealistic this idea might at first appear, it is the only logical way out of the increasingly pitched battles about who should sit on the bench. And for that reason, it is overwhelmingly likely to be the eventual outcome.

Certainly, the announced intentions of Senate Republicans not to grant hearings, a vote or even personal meetings to anyone President Obama nominates is not good for the court, the country or even, perhaps, the Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's claim that "the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice" is a constitutional non sequitur. If the framers had wanted the people to have a voice in the selection of the justices, they would have provided for their election. Instead, the Constitution envisions a judiciary that is more remote from political influences. That is why federal judges serve for life, so that they are not beholden to political sponsors or ideological trends.

Furthermore, it's not clear that the Republicans will gain much. Assuming Obama chooses someone who is personable and highly qualified, the sight of Senate Republicans with their hands clapped over their eyes, ears and mouths cannot sit well with the independents who may hold the political balance of power in the fall. Moreover, having called for what is essentially a plebiscite on who should choose the next justice, the Republicans have essentially cut the ground out from under themselves to oppose the selection if a Democrat wins the presidency.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are bound to oppose any choice of a Republican winner, since doing otherwise would reward the conservatives for short-circuiting Obama's constitutional prerogative. The Democrats will employ delaying tactics of their own, including a filibuster if they remain in the minority. Justice Scalia's seat could theoretically remain vacant until the 2018 elections loom or Democrats secure a larger role in naming the replacement.

The alternative to prolonged stalemate is consensus and a clear-eyed understanding of how we got into this mess. At the time the Constitution was written, and through most of the 19th century, the law was viewed as something as objective as science, with neutral decisional principles. In the 20th century, a jurisprudential view called legal realism began to take hold. It holds that judges decide cases, when there is no clear precedent, according to their own moral and political preferences. By now, everybody — Republican and Democrat — is a legal realist. No one believes a nominee will keep his or her personal views out of decisions.

Because of that, there is a traditional argument by some legal realists that judges should labor to decide as little as possible and defer to the political process. Usually, this point is advanced with the greatest force by the side whose ox got most recently gored. Thus Roe vs. Wade was scorned by conservatives as the height of judicial activism. But instead of embracing restraint, once conservatives took over the court, they became right-wing activists instead. In the 2008 case D.C. vs. Heller, Scalia, speaking for a 5-4 majority, concluded for the first time in the 220 years of our constitutional republic that the Second Amendment granted citizens the right to keep guns in their homes.

But the idea that a one-vote majority of the Supreme Court can identify new constitutional rights is very hard to square with the Constitution itself, which provides that it can be changed only as the result of a widespread political consensus. Amendments require a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states.

So to make peace and end stalemate, we need to change the court's decisionmaking style and its willingness to inject itself into intensely political disputes. The game in recent presidential administrations has been to appoint to the Supreme Court people with no more than a brief judicial record so they can't be cudgeled during confirmation hearings with decades of decisions. But I'd say we should be looking for somebody with a long judicial record that, in the eyes of both sides, evinces the most restrained judicial manner and a deliberate effort to stay off the political battlefront.

As the pivotal vote on the court, the new justice would be in a unique position to force it to moderate its style, to decide cases on the narrowest possible grounds, to overrule its own precedents with the greatest reluctance, to strike down legislative enactments solely when there is broad agreement among justices, and to recognize new individual rights only in the same circumstances and when there is a clear consensus in the country.

This would not be the first time the court has retreated politically. In the early 1930s, the Supreme Court invalidated major pieces of New Deal legislation. After a sweeping re-election victory in 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed expanding the size of the court in order to create a majority more to his liking. That proposal foundered, both because of congressional reluctance, but also because Owen Roberts changed his mind and voted to overrule a decision made only two years before and to sustain a number of pieces of New Deal legislation. The court thereafter deferred to the mandate of Roosevelt's overwhelming electoral victories.

I know many people would deride what I'm saying as unrealistic, arguing with some basis that the last 50 years have produced a legal culture where judges don't even understand how to be restrained. And I recognize that remitting decisions to a political process as strife-ridden as ours risks increasing stalemate, not ending it. My response is that a court less inclined to take sides will increase the pressure for congressional compromise. And compromising on who sits on the court might pave the way.

But I would be willing to bet that a truth that seems so profound to me will soon command an overwhelming majority among voters, in state legislatures and on the court itself. A decision like Obergefell would be even more heartening at 8-1 or 9-0.