The Supreme Court is losing legitimacy, Sarah Isgur argues in her new book, and the only real way to protect what she calls the last branch standing is to make the institution harder to attack and easier to trust. In Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today’s Supreme Court, she says the court is under pressure from partisan critics and presidents who do not want their power challenged.
That warning matters now because the court’s standing is no longer being tested only in opinion pages or campaign speeches. Isgur’s argument is that judges should be above partisan politics and should be seen to be above partisan politics, and that the court can no longer rely on prestige alone to keep that promise intact.
One of the book’s main proposals, developed by Thomas Harvey and Thomas Koenig, is a two-track judicial confirmation system. Under the first track, a nominee would need a filibuster-proof supermajority of 60 votes. Under the second, if a nominee could not reach 60 votes, the nominee could be supported by a bare majority of senators in two successive Congresses. A nominee provisionally confirmed by simple majority would come back for another vote after an intervening election, and if the Senate backed the nominee again by a simple majority, the judge would be deemed confirmed and take the bench.
That same logic runs through the ethics section of the book. The Supreme Court adopted its ethics code in 2023 for the first time in its history, but Isgur says a code only matters if it can be enforced. She proposes an ethics board made up of fully retired federal judges to review complaints against the justices, issue public opinions on ambiguous provisions, recommend how a justice could cure a problem, and, if a violation continued, send a letter of censure.
The tension in the book is plain: the court is asking the public to trust a code and a nomination process that still depend heavily on the justices and senators most exposed to political combat. Isgur’s answer is not to lower the bar for the court, but to raise the cost of ignoring it. If the institution wants to remain the last branch standing, her case is that it will have to prove that legitimacy can be defended by rules that mean something.
