The GOP seating ANY Supreme Court Justice this year would permanently & irrevocably destroy politics

I think the SCOTUS’s reputation is already done. It’s already quite obviously just another political branch of the government – right now it’s a GOP branch. With luck maybe it will become a Democratic branch at some point, if the process to pick SCOTUS justices isn’t fixed. But there’s no chance of it resuming its role as a fair and objective arbiter of law and the Constitution unless there’s a huge change to the process of how justices are chosen.