With allegations of political bias on behalf of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife in favor of a Tea Party group, it’s a good time for the country to consider whether judicial appointments should be essentially off-limits when it comes to ensuring governmental checks and balances.

American history is rife with tales of justices who’ve gone beyond the pale in blocking progressive legislation and/or openly favored one side over another. The Supreme Court did this in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which found that Scott, a slave, had no standing to file suit, that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in new U.S. territories, and that as private property, and that slaves could not be taken away from their owners without due process.

Rather than help resolve the most divisive issue in our history, this backward-looking decision helped ensure the violence of the Civil War, which finally settled whether slavery would be allowed.

President Franklin Roosevelt faced a Supreme Court in the 1930s that kept overturning his New Deal legislation, which sought to curb the excesses of the financial and investment industry and establish a social safety net with jobless insurance, Social Security and direct spending on employment. Despite the emergency of a depression, the court refused to move beyond a 19th century laissez-faire attitude pertaining to business.

That president eventually tried to add justices to the court — or “pack it” — and, although he was heavily criticized and was blocked in that effort, the court eventually did stop overturning FDR’s agenda. Perhaps they had received a powerful message.

Today, we have an era in which nearly all pretense toward objectivity and rulings based on legal tradition has gone out the window for some justices. Most of these have been, in recent decades, conservatives apparently convinced they must save the nation from “godless liberals,” “socialists” or some such boogeymen.

That’s why the option of impeaching justices — which Congress has under the Constitution — should be more often considered, if only to counter the increasing role of the courts in modern life. The trend has been toward every issue winding up in court — most often with the monied side prevailing through attrition — and it is time political leaders took back their proper lead role in deciding public agendas and policies.

After all, the courts have shown on every appellate level — not just with the U.S. Supreme Court — that they can be as politically motivated as Congress or the state legislatures. Most are not, however, as accountable through the ballot box.

In fact, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase was impeached by the House (requiring a majority vote) in 1804 in part for allegedly letting his political opinions influence his decisions and acquitted in the Senate (requiring a two-thirds vote) in 1805. If unsuccessful in that bid, Congress had at least sent the message that partisanship from a justice interpreting the constitution falls under the “high crimes and misdemeanors” required for impeachment.

— The Bennington (Vt.) Banner