Professor Calabresi has an explanation for this outbreak of modesty. The Judicial Conference “suffers from a severe bias,” he writes. “The prestige and power associated with being an Article III federal judge goes down if a large number of new federal court judgeships are created. This causes the Judicial Conference to continuously ask for the creation of fewer new judgeships than we really need.” (Article III of the Constitution creates the federal judiciary and is the source of federal judges’ life tenure.) While the leaders of the federal judiciary hardly need me to defend their dignity, I’ll just say that it’s hard to think of a more demeaning appraisal of how these judges approach their jobs.

Why bother to call attention to a proposal that’s unlikely to make any legislative headway? After all, don’t both sides play judicial politics?

Yes, Democrats do too, to a degree. But the Democratic left was furious with the Obama administration for its diffident approach to filling judicial vacancies. There has never been anything like the weaponizing of the federal judiciary that is currently taking place. Seventeen of President Trump’s 18 nominees to the federal appeals courts are connected to the Federalist Society. Donald McGahn, the White House counsel, joked at the Federalist Society’s annual convention in Washington last week that it was “completely false” that the Trump administration was outsourcing to the group the task of finding judicial nominees. “I’ve been a member of the Federalist Society since law school,” Mr. McGahn said. “Still am, so frankly it seems like it’s been in-sourced.”

Before now, the most concerted effort to redirect the federal courts came during the Reagan administration, which placed an impressive group of conservative law professors and other intellectuals on the appeals courts. But the most consequential Reagan nomination, that of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, failed. It’s possible today, a generation later, to see a playing out of the Bork battle, carried on by those too young to have taken part back in 1987 but who came of age in the belief that their hero was dealt a mighty injustice. And certainly we would be living in a much different constitutional universe had Robert Bork been sitting in the Supreme Court seat that went instead to Anthony Kennedy.

In my reporting days, I tried periodically to get my colleagues to break the journalistic habit of identifying federal judges by the president who appointed them. It was just wrong to imply to readers that judges who were simply doing their job as they thought best were carrying water for their political sponsors, I would argue. I never made much headway. I’m not sure I would make the same effort today. A weaponized judiciary poses real dangers to the legitimacy of the federal courts, and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.

The newest Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, was the featured speaker at last week’s Federalist Society convention. Accompanied by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., Justice Gorsuch gave a half-hour long speech that could be boiled down to a phrase: “I’m your man.” He said: “Tonight I can report, a person can be both a committed originalist and textualist and be confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support and prayers through that process.”

Last month, during the argument in the Wisconsin gerrymander case, Chief Justice Roberts worried aloud that if the court involved itself in the nitty-gritty of redistricting, with rulings that favored one party or the other, people would conclude that the justices were acting politically, “and that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country.” Justice Gorsuch received standing ovations before and after he spoke. Chief Justice Roberts wasn’t there. Wherever he was, I’m willing to bet he wasn’t cheering.