In Why is the Supreme Court Supreme? , the historian Thomas Reeves argues that the Supreme Court works pretty well as it is, or as well as it is likely to. Responding to the question “Why should the American people be ruled by nine unelected lawyers?”, for example, he argues that
every nation and organization needs a person or a body of people that can settle issues once and for all, a place where, as Harry Truman put it, the buck stops. The alternative is chaos often followed by violence. While Americans want nothing to do with kings or emperors, we, too, need a source of final authority. Think of the mayhem that might well have occurred following the election of 2000 without a Supreme Court to halt the shenanigans going on in Florida.
The Court continues to play this role because it works, and we are a practical people. We’ve had our Civil War and are now content (at least the vast majority of us) to work together as a single nation under law, as defined by the Supreme Court.
Reeves, a conservative Catholic and biographer of JFK and Fulton Sheen, contributed Not So Christian America to First Things (it’s behind the wall).
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