Thread by @rachelshelden

Re: #CourtPacking: many have become so inured to the idea that #SCOTUS has been and should be apolitical that we miss the forest for the trees. While we debate whether SCOTUS is political (it is) members have used the apolitical posture to increase the Court's authority/power. 1/

Consider Chief Justice Roberts' repeated insistence that the justices are umpires in conjunction with the enormous amount of power he amassed as the "swing" vote in the last term. 2/

With some notable exceptions (thx @StrictScrutiny_), Roberts was praised as an "institutionalist" for those votes by court watchers. The idea that the Court was behaving "apolitically" seemed to translate into an increase in public faith in #SCOTUS 3/

Lots of legal scholars and political scientists have written about how to address the Court's power today and I especially recommend this piece by @samuelmoyn & @rddoerfler theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… 4/

But I think we #Twitterstorians need to move beyond the simple point that the Constitution does not prescribe the # of justices & that the # has changed. We should talk more broadly about how #SCOTUS has operated historically as part of the political system. 5/

This piece by @karpmj is a good start: jacobinmag.com/2020/09/abraha…. But the fight over Dred Scott also existed in the context of a much less powerful #SCOTUS and a much more fluid notion of what the Court could or should be 6/

In this context, #SCOTUS's health as an institution did not rely on the apolitical posture the public seems to prefer today. Its institutional health had a much closer relationship to how limited its power/authority was. 7/

So we should stop thinking about this as a two-dimensional problem of political v. apolitical courts. It's a three-dimensional problem involving politics, power/authority, and institutionalism. 8/

The unsettled nature of constitutional politics historically is an important guide for us to reframe the conversation. Historians have a big role to play in that reframing. 9/9