Yesterday evening, after the business of the day was concluded, we gathered our children before a computer and clicked on whitehouse.gov to watch the swearing in of the 17th chief justice of the United States. We found ourselves thinking of the significance of the title, that the individual who leads the third branch of the government is not chief justice merely of the court but of the entire country. Yet we were also struck at the relative modesty of the swearing in ceremony. The third branch may be coequal with the first, but, unlike a presidential inauguration, no cannons reported, no trumpets sounded, no fanfares crackled. The president invited the senior associate justice of the Supreme Court, John Paul Stevens, to administer the oath. He wasted not a moment. When Judge Roberts swore, hands were shaken, and the nation had a new chief justice. It may not happen again until our youngest children are adults.

The new chief justice spoke only briefly, and the one constitutional principle on which he remarked was the separation of powers. The way the Constitution puts it is that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint” the judges of the Supreme Court, which is probably the logic of the nominee returning to the White House for his swearing in before heading back Pennsylvania Avenue to the Court itself. There was an extraordinary amount of good cheer in the room, with roars of applause when the president, the about-to-become chief justice, his wife, and Justice Stevens entered and when the oath was taken. It was, after the contentiousness of the hearings, nice to have a happy ending.

There will be now – as the remarks of one of our greatest constitutional practitioners, Theodore Olson, excerpted nearby, suggest – much discussion about the bitterness and divisiveness of our confirmation process. We do not object to the lack of unanimity. On the contrary, the existence of dissent is in and of itself a good and honorable thing. In the days of the Sanhedrin, the body of great rabbis, capital sentences couldn’t be handed down if the initial verdict was unanimous. The sages had to go back to the case. The existence of dissent was confirmation of honest and full consideration. So we don’t necessarily take comfort from the overwhelming margins with which, say, Justices Scalia and Ginsburg were confirmed. What we take to be General Olson’s point has to do with the arbitrary and ad hominem nature of the opposition, an intent almost to defeat the constitutional logic established by the Founders of America.

The new chief justice made a point of noting that he viewed the vote in the Senate yesterday as “confirmation of what is for me a bedrock principle, that judging is different from politics.” It was a wise and unifying point to make. But it does not necessarily follow that politics itself is disunifying, and one of Mr. Olson’s points at the Gauer lecture here in New York, from which the remarks in the adjacent columns are excerpted, is precisely that there is a link between the ballot box and our battles over the court. The confirmation process, he concludes, “will only continue to get worse, more combative and retributive, until the public stands up and insists that they have had enough. And, unless a few senators who are the worst offenders are defeated at the ballot box.”

Meantime Chief Justice Roberts will mount the high bench, and we will rarely hear him speak again, at least not when he says something important. That will now be done in the calm, quiet and permanence of written decisions, directed at particular cases, particular persons, in a way that the legislature, which may pass no bill of attainder, is prohibited by the Constitution from doing business. Given the records of the chief justices – and associate justices – who have preceded him, it is hard to predict how he will actually rule. It is one of the glories of the United States that it can, in the end, vest so much power in one individual with such a modest ceremony and agree to abide by the judgment he, and eight other men and women, make, until some better argument sways the high court to take a different turn or until the Congress can be convinced to change the law or the Congress and the States to change the Constitution itself.