News that the approval rating of the Supreme Court has plunged to “just 44 percent” is being reported this morning at the top of page one of the New York Times. The dispatch, by the newspaper’s Supreme Court leg, Adam Liptak, also reports that three quarters of those polled by the Times, in harness with the Columbia Broadcasting System, reckon the justices’ decisions “are sometimes influenced,” as the Times put it, “by their personal or political views.” The findings, the paper reports, “are a fresh indication that the court’s standing with the public has slipped significantly in the past quarter century. . .”

Well by gum, we have a reform. Why not make the Supreme Court justices stand for election? Then maybe we could get a more popular crowd up there on the high bench. One could stagger their terms so that three of them had to stand every two years. Or one could set it up that a justice still gets life tenure, the way things are set up now, but he or she has to get elected the first time. Or — this idea was sent in by our sometimes correspondent known as Radical Pete — why not make the Supreme Court’s opinions provisional, until they are ratified by the people — or the state legislatures — at the end of the Court’s term.

The way Pete’s point would work is that let’s say the Supreme Court sustains Obamacare. Let’s say it decides the Commerce Clause is no bar to requiring a person to purchase health insurance. Shouldn’t that opinion then go to the people who are going to have to purchase the health insurance for approval? Or at least to the states? After all, 26 of the states are in court already, trying to get Obamacare overturned. Or let’s say the Supreme Court decides that when the writers of the 14^th Amendment said that no state shall deny any person equal protection of the laws, they meant to extend marriage to same-sex couples. Wouldn’t we solve the Times’ concern by putting that to a vote?

Forgive our sarcasm, but sometimes the New York Times is just a wonder. We sit down with it every morning and brace ourselves for yet another editorial railing about the evil of the fact that some states elect their judges. “[C]hoosing judges in partisan elections, rather than through a system of merit selection, can create a serious problem of quality control,” the paper harrumphed in an editorial called “No Way to Choose a Judge.” It was issued in March. “Elections are the worst way to select judges,” the newspaper’s editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, wrote in a post on his Web log a couple of months later. “The process leaves judges beholden to party bosses, wealthy donors, and the whims of the very, very few people who actually bother to vote.”

Well, which way is it going to be? Is the Times going to come out for the election of judges in a popular vote? Or is it going to bellyache about the way the approval rating of the Nine is plummeting? The trick here is to feature the fact that getting elected to office doesn’t guarantee one’s popularity. Ask Mr. Obama. Or Mr. Bush. Or the United States Congress, whose approval rating isn’t a quarter of the Supreme Court’s. This is why our own bias is in favor of the current constitutional system, where the justices of the Supreme Court (and the inferior federal benches) are nominated by a popularly elected president and confirmed by a Senate that represents the states through senators chosen by their state’s people.

If one had to reform the system, we’d have the justices chosen by a vote of the 50 state legislatures and then ratified by the president. In other words, we’d try to give the high contracting parties — that is, the states — a bit more skin in the game. Either way, we’d let the justices continue in office “during good behavior,” which is the way the Constitution has it set up now. Of course, the Constitution doesn’t say what “good behavior” is. Our own view is that good behavior is a technical constitutional term denoting that something is okay with the newspapers of the era. That, however, is not written down anywhere, which is no doubt why the newspaper editors who tend to get nervous deal with it by taking polls.