A MyDD laugher regarding the Supreme Court

Jonathan Singer at MyDD parts ways with Chief Justice John Roberts on the desirability of having nothing but former federal appellate justices on the United States Supreme Court, as it is now composed for the first time in its history.  I can sympathize, up to a point.  It probably doesn’t hurt for a court, and especially SCOTUS, to be composed of more than pointy-headed intellectuals from academia via the federal bench.

What I find laughable, though, is Singer’s rationale for having more former legislators on the court (emphasis mine):

[T]his is the first time in United States history that the Supreme Court is entirely made up of former federal appellate judges. It is also only the second time in 220 years that the Court is without a justice with legislative experience (the other time being the period between Hugo Black’s retirement in 1971 and Sandra Day O’Connor’s selection in 1981). Indeed, as of 2005, when I first wrote on this subject, more than two in five members of the Supreme Court throughout history have had experience serving in a legislature, including more than one in five who had served in Congress.

This doesn’t mean that the Supreme Court should function like a super-legislature, or that it was intended to function as such. But those who have previously served in public office, more than those who have remained in the ivory tower of academia or the highest of courts, have a better sense of the practical impact their decisions can have on citizens of this country. Perhaps more importantly, they, better than those who haven’t spent some times in politics, understand how to expand a divided and divisive 5 to 4 majority — which we seem to be seeing more and more of as the narrow conservative majority on the Court appears intent to press it’s advantage to overturn decades of precedent — into a more stable 6 to 3, or even 7 to 2 majority.

Has anyone seen any evidence of the point in italics?  You could use almost any act of congress to illustrate the law of unintended consequences.  The purpose of the pointy-headed intellectual approach of justices to the law is that the consequences, except insofar as they might affect the actual legal process, are not normally a consideration. I can see how someone might object to that approach.  But to argue that legislators are more prescient about what those consequences will be . . . well, that strikes me as crazy.

Singer’s final point is intellectually troubling.  Apparently, he wants people skilled at backroom deal-making to cary that practice to the nations’s highest court.  From what I know of the court’s operation (prescious little), that already goes on, in a sense.  Justices compromise on language in order to bring other justices on board, sometimes because they just disagree over how to say the same thing.  But legislators are more used to substantive bargaining than quibbling over precise expression of the same idea, and I don’t want the justices haggling with each other like they’re at a flea market.