For all these months, Chief Justice Roberts has deflected questions about the impact the vacancy has had on the court, even as evidence has mounted that the polarized justices are having trouble even agreeing on what to decide. On the February argument calendar the court issued late last month, only seven of the 10 usual argument slots are filled. (Only the fact that the Presidents Day holiday falls on Monday, Feb. 20, ordinarily an argument day, saved the court from having five argument slots go unfilled, rather than three.)

The February calendar omitted — as had the October, November and December argument calendars — an important religion case, Trinity Lutheran Church v. Pauley, that the court accepted last January and that has been fully briefed and ready for argument since the summer. The case challenges the constitutionality of a provision of the Missouri Constitution that prohibits the expenditure of public money “directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion,” in this case the state’s refusal to let a church nursery school use a state grant program to upgrade its playground. The facts of the case make it appear almost trivial, but the question is a profound one of what limits the Constitution places on public financial support for religious institutions.

The church lost its case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, and Justice Scalia’s vote to hear the appeal last January was one of the last significant votes that he cast. It’s evident that without his vote on the merits, the remaining eight justices are locked in a 4-to-4 tie and have decided not to proceed. Four votes are needed to accept a case for argument. The court does not announce how individual justices vote on granting a case, but from the extrinsic evidence of the current eight-justice deadlock, I feel safe in assuming that no more than five justices voted to accept the case, and that Justice Scalia was one of them.

I’ll grant that it would have been a delicate matter for the chief justice to wade into national politics at this almost impossibly freighted moment, weeks before he is to administer the presidential oath to Donald J. Trump. (However awkward that moment might be, given that Mr. Trump has denounced Chief Justice Roberts as “a nightmare for conservatives,” it probably won’t match the awkwardness eight years ago. The chief justice then had the task of administering the oath to Barack Obama, who as a senator had voted against confirming him to the court.)

But it seems to me that if there was ever a moment to put delicacy aside, this was it. If the court isn’t suffering internally from the prolonged vacancy, it is surely suffering in the eyes of the public. People don’t have to be familiar with the intricacies of the docket to regard the court as little more than a prize of presidential politics, perhaps a tarnished prize at that.

No one expects the chief justice to take political sides in this ugly political season. But Chief Justice Rehnquist hated the exclusionary rule that Judge Baer invoked in suppressing the tainted evidence, and he strongly opposed the citation of foreign law, and yet he found a way to speak up for judicial independence in a way that stood apart from politics.

There should be nothing partisan about the chief justice of the United States’ declaring that keeping a Supreme Court seat vacant for a year (actually, it certainly will turn out to be more than a year) so that an incumbent president couldn’t fill it was an unfortunate development that should not be permitted to become the norm. If making such a statement is regarded as unduly partisan, we’re in even worse trouble than I thought.