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While “personnel reforms” are meant “to restore ‘balance’ to the court and in that sense return it to its place ‘above politics,’” Doerfler said, "disempowering reforms" are meant to address the problem of "being governed by philosopher kings," which cannot entirely be solved by making them less excessively "partisan."

Mark Joseph Stern: So I have a pet theory that trial court judges have a baseline of competence that is all too often missing among the philosopher Kings and Queens of the appellate courts.

Because ultimately concerns for “legitimacy”—not empirical measurements of it, or scrutiny for where it was lost, but free-floating, abstract institutional feelings-ball—trumps placing even modest limits on our philosopher kings.

Plato thought this power too consequential to be entrusted to poets, whom he would ban from his ideal republic, leaving the politics of representation in the hands of philosopher kings.

Courts are the least democratic branch of government to begin with; judges are like robed “philosopher kings” with the power to overturn measures overwhelmingly favored by the people.