These members must avoid a primary challenge at any cost. But they don’t need to worry about voter backlash, even if they wreck the economy and the nation’s credit. That’s because scientific gerrymandering of House districts has made them all but immune to defeat by a Democratic opponent. In the 2012 election nationwide, Democratic candidates won a plurality of the vote, 48.8 percent to 48.47. But clever districting produced a Republican majority of 234-201 — nearly 54 percent of the seats. In many districts, voters have no real choice.

Red-state Republican senators who fear popular disgust — from, say, Latinos reacting to their resistance to immigration reform — have another line of defense: 18 states have passed vote-suppression measures since 2011. In close elections, just keeping one or two percent of the voters at home can make all the difference. In other words, American democracy is breaking down. It’s war to the knife between the parties.

In this spectacle of decay, the Court’s hands aren’t clean. Over the past two decades, a series of silly and impractical decisions, taken together, have helped clog the arteries of our political system. If that system suffers a catastrophic infarction next month, the Court must shoulder part of the blame.

Take polarization. Here is what may be the worst prophecy ever to appear in the United States Reports: "As for the case at hand, if properly managed by the District Court, it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of petitioner's time." Those words appeared in Justice John Paul Stevens’s opinion for the Court in the 1997 case of Clinton v. Jones, in which President Bill Clinton asked the Court to stay a sexual-harassment lawsuit brought against him by Paula Jones. He did not ask for dismissal, just a delay until after he left office, arguing that having to respond to civil actions would distract him from his duties. Pish-tush, replied the justices. The result was the first impeachment and trial of a sitting president in more than a century. No single event has done more to foul the atmosphere of today’s politics.

Two years later, the five-justice conservative majority awarded the White House to George W. Bush, who systematically deepened political division in his years as president. "Get over it!" Justice Antonin Scalia likes to say when citizens question Bush v. Gore. Why should they? The nation hasn’t gotten over Bush; we’re not even close.

The gerrymander of 2010 flowed directly from a 2004 case where the Court considered Pennsylvania's carefully orchestrated, computer-driven redistricting — a partisan coup openly designed to maximize Republican gains. The same five who picked Bush threw the redistricting plaintiffs out of court. Scalia wrote for four of the five, "'Fairness' does not seem to us a judicially manageable standard."