More than two hundred years after the Supreme Court was conceived by Congress as an apolitical branch of government, expected to adjudicate presidential and legislative actions that defied constitutional precedent, it's common knowledge that this Supreme Court is stacked with conservative justices who are happy to legislate from the bench in service of a much broader Republican agenda.
Nowhere is this agenda more evident than in the court's nomination process, which has in recent decades devolved into an open mic for GOP theatricality. Long gone are the days of (relatively) good-faith hearings in which Republicans actually probed the latest nominee's jurisprudence. Republicans now insist that each nomination starts where the last left off, unloading partisan baggage that overshadows any attempt at substantive questioning.
