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OldHippie I agree, it's ridiculous. The U.S. Supreme Court has basically been turned into a rubber stamp for whatever legislature confirm the justices. This could be remedied by requiring a super-majority for confirmation. It wasn't that long ago that justices were confirmed almost unanimously. This would prevent obvious partisan hacks from being nominated or confirmed, which is what we have now. Instead, justices would be confirmed based on their legal expertise.
Erwin Chemerinsky, the Dean of Berkeley Law, has argued in his book
The Case Against the Supreme Court that aside from a few landmark decisions, the court has been a conservative institution that mostly protected the powerful from the powerless.