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>>they are no longer impartial arbiters of what the law says, but have become participants in the political process<<

They aren't and never have been. You can predict how pretty much all of the US Supreme Court justices will vote, based on their political philosophy. I am a lawyer, took several classes on various aspects of constitutional law both undergrad and law school. It gets to the point where it's fairly easy. O'Connor and Kennedy are harder to predict.

It's been that way since the beginning. Marshall, one of the most important Federalist judges, shaped the entire court according to Federalist principles, q.v. Marbury vs. Madison, and another 30 years of opinion that firmly centered power in the federal government. McCulloch vs. Maryland, which upheld the power to establish a national bank. Hamiltonian vision all the way.

Then take a look at Taney, who helped Jackson dismantle the second Bank of the United States, and wrote the Dred Scott decision, which declared that no slave or former slave could be a plaintiff in federal court because they were not citizens of the United States. Dred Scott was one of the triggers to the Civil War. Taney believed in state's rights, and he did everything he could to promote that vision.

Read the saga of substantive due process if you want a quick-and-easy lesson on partisan opinion writing.

No, impartial arbiters of the law they have never been.

I disagree. There have been long periods in the Court's history when the Court mostly kept it's nose out of politics and enjoyed great respect. One such era was after the Court stopped using substantive due process to strike down New Deal legislation up to the Warren Court. The Erie decision was an admirable exercise in restraint, requiring the federal courts to bow to the states in matters of state law. For decades substantive due process was a discredited approach.

Then came the Warren Court. The Brown decision was a good one, reversing the activist opinion that approved segregation despite the plain language of the equal protection clause. But soon the Court couldn't resist legislating on issues like state legislatures redistricting.

You cite to some of the periods in the past when the Court went down the same road. The Dred Scott case was a terrible example of judicial activism with Taney just making things up. In some ways Taney and O'Connor share common characteristics in that both want to use judicial activism to build what they think will be a popular legacy. O'Connor should give the comparison some thought.