Courts shield the link. They're politically insulated.

Absent, too, in the modern Congress is any real sense that the Supreme Court can be brought to heel: say, by constitutional amendment, by stripping the Court of funding, by hauling in members of the Court to justify their rulings before congressional investigatory committees, by appointing special counsels to review and report back on what the Court does, by impeaching the Justices (or locking them up), or by simply ignoring or defying judicial rulings. Perhaps the Court does not rule in ways that offend enough members of Congress (or their constituents) for them to invest the energy—and political capital—required to generate these sorts of measures. Perhaps, instead, members of Congress do not consider such measures appropriate in our constitutional system. In either case, modesty on the part of Congress is the result, even in an era when a single party controls both the Congress and the White House. The lesson for the Court is that so long as it continues doing—more or less—what is has done in recent years, it has very little to fear from the Congress.

CONCLUSION

After President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by the death of Justice Scalia, fifteen House Republicans sponsored a Resolution that “the House firmly supports the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court” and “the Senate should hold a swift confirmation of this nomination.”229 The proposed resolution died, without further action, in the Committee on the Judiciary. While Gorsuch was, of course, confirmed, the failure of the Republican-controlled House to pass a simple resolution supporting the nomination is telling. After an election season in which the Supreme Court figured very prominently, aside from the Senate’s confirmation of a new Justice, Congress in 2017 accomplished nothing with respect to the Supreme Court. Various bills and resolutions—some sponsored by Republicans, others by Democrats, and some garnering bipartisan support—targeted statutory and constitutional rulings by the Court and sought also to impose new regulations upon the Court’s activities. Even the most modest of these proposals failed to advance through the legislative process and become law. We like to think that the Supreme Court, guided solely by the rule of law, is above politics. The experience of 2017 suggests that the Court may also be above politics in the quite different sense that its rulings and activities are largely immune to political response and redress.