Oh yeah - with Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito on the court, my respect for the Court as a non-partisan institution is at an all-time high. Problem solved.

Interesting - Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito were all U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges before they were Justices of the Supreme Court. Are they somehow more "political" than Chief Justice Warren, who had been a lifelong politician and Governor of California? (A Republican, at that. Eisenhower's one Presidential regret.) Are the new conservative justices somehow more ideological than Justice Ginsburg, who was an ACLU lawyer?

You are of course free to hate the conservative justices because they don't rule the way you want them to. But "partisan" is hardly an appropriate term.

The real irony here is that the inordinate power of the courts in general is a direct, causally-linked product of liberal courts' activism. We now live in an age where the state of California is suing auto makers for selling cars. Where human rights issues in Myanmar are being made the subject of civil litigation in Los Angeles. Where U.S. military personnel in combat areas in foreign lands are being forced to think about their actions being made the subject of federal court actions in Virginia.

Thank you, liberals, for this judicial mess.

You say that lethal injection, done properly, is probably not "cruel and unusual."

In turn, I'd have to say that lethal injection, done improperly, may be cruel and unusual.

Maybe those issues will be sorted out before the Supreme Court. But what is wholly improper is for one side to argue that lethal injection is inherently painful and cruel, and there can be no capital punishment that is anything other than cruel and unusual. What is offensive about that argument is that it is tantamount to amending the Constitution, to ban capital punishment, without going through the proces of a formal amendment.