There are those who do not agree with Linda Greenhouse, but that misses the more fundamental point:  Ms. Greenhouse encourages us to think.

A recent New York Times op-ed by Ms. Greenhouse argues that the recent focus on political polarization in the Supreme Court obscures a deeper problem: “The problem is not only that the court is too often divided but that it’s too often simply wrong,” writes Greenhouse. “Wrong in the battles it picks, wrong in setting an agenda that mimics a Republican Party platform, wrong in refusing to give the political system breathing room to make fundamental choices of self-governance.”

Greenhouse argues that the Court’s Republican majority “is committed to harnessing the Supreme Court to an ideological agenda . . . from the way the court invited and then accepted a fundamental challenge to public employee labor unions in Harris v. Quinn . . . to its brick-by-brick deregulation of campaign finance; to its obsession with race and with drawing the final curtain on the civil rights revolution.”

Greenhouse, therefore, does not view the polarization in our Supreme Court as a simple reflection of the polarization in our political branches:  “I wonder whether the Supreme Court itself has become an engine of polarization, keeping old culture-war battles alive and forcing to the surface old conflicts that people were managing to live with. Suppose, in other words, that instead of blaming our politics for giving us the court we have, we should place on the court at least some of the blame for our politics.”