Agreed. I was just pontificating about how to (IMHO) correct an oversight by the Founders regarding appointment of Justices. It's not right that ideological Justices have so much influence over which POTUS will replace them. New SCOTUS Justices should only be appointed after a Presidential election so the voters can decide the POTUS to make the appointment.
There was no oversight by the Founders. We took a good system and screwed it up.
The original Supreme Court wasn't a very powerful place. Keep in mind that the Supreme Court (and all federal courts) only has jurisdiction over cases between parties of different states (diversity of citizenship jurisdiction), cases decided under federal laws (federal question jurisdiction), cases in international waters (maritime jurisdiction), and cases in which the United States is a party. Well, the Constitution imposed huge limitations on federal power, so there just weren't very many federal laws under which federal question jurisdiction could be invoked. Furthermore, it was a much smaller and more localized nation back then, so there weren't many cases between citizens of different states. The last two areas that trigger federal jurisdiction are even narrower and still are pretty narrow.
For some perspective, the first Chief Justice (John Jay) presided for six years, and the Court heard a grand total of four cases, only one of which was particularly important, and that case was overturned by the 11th Amendment. Chief Justice Jay quit the Court to run for governor of New York. (Can you imagine John Roberts quitting the Supreme Court to run for something else? Of course not.) The point is that the Court just wasn't that big of deal, so giving a federal judge a lifetime appointment wasn't the end of the world, even if he ended up not being a particularly good judge.
Since 1789, we've amended the Constitution and almost always in the direction of expanding federal power and therefore federal question jurisdiction. Hell, the 14th Amendment virtually gives the federal courts veto power over any law passed by a state if they choose to apply it broadly enough. That's ridiculous.
We also had a different view of what a judge was supposed to do. His personal integrity and commitment to following the written law mattered a lot more, so it mattered a lot less what a judge's political agenda was. Now, all we care about is the policy agenda, and we let and encourage judges to make that the focus of their rulings. Think about it. If Sonia Sotomayor was truly going to follow the law to the letter of the law and leave her "wise Latina" ******** at the door where it belongs, would we care if she got on the Court? I wouldn't. She's an intelligent, well-reasoned, and well-qualified person to be on the Court. The only reason I didn't want her on the Court and would celebrate if she quit is that I know she won't leave it at the door. In fact, she wouldn't even care to be a justice if she had to leave it at the door.