There is no reason in the world why a president should not pack the Court—appoint people to the Court who are sympathetic to his political and philosophical principles." So Justice William Rehnquist answered Democratic charges that the 1984 reelection of President Ronald Reagan could change the direction of Supreme Court policymaking. Because justices serve for life, they furnish a president with historic opportunities to influence the direction of national policy well beyond his own term.

The myth occasionally circulates that appointments should be made strictly on merit. But the reality is that every appointment is political. Merit competes with other political considerations, such as personal and ideological compatibility, the forces of support or opposition within Congress and the White House, and demands for representative appointments based on geography, religion, race, gender, and ethnicity.

Packing the Court has come to mean not merely filling the bench with political associates and ideological kin, but accommodating demands for other kinds of symbolic political representation. Just as some people maintain that merit