There is a prevalent counterpart to the “typo” argument among liberals. The Supreme Court, they contend, must contemplate the moral implications of their decision. “Since we’ve built something as intrusive and wide-ranging as possible, you can never touch it because too many people will be hurt and the fallout would be terrible.” Maybe they’re right (although I doubt it).  But there is a more idealistic reason to argue that SCOTUS should ignore political implications.

This week, Supreme Court struck down a disputed law that would have allowed Americans born in Jerusalem to list their birthplace as Israel on their passports. The State Department refuses to identify Jerusalem as the capital of Israel for obvious political reasons. Now, a person can believe that this policy is both ludicrous and unhelpful and at the same time recognize that SCOTUS’s decision preserving the Constitution’s distribution of foreign policy power makes a lot of sense. Because it’s possible to detach your feelings about specific laws from a constitutional process. Or, at least, it should be.

These days, only half of Americans “trust” that Supreme Court will do the right thing on health care, according to a new CNN/ORC poll. The question is, trust them to do what? To do their jobs and weigh the legality of the law, or to work backwards from the notion that nothing is more critical to the American experience than protecting this contentious, unpopular piece of legislation? We already know what the president thinks. But we still don’t know what Americans believe.