Ruth Marcus has covered every United States Supreme Court confirmation battle for The Washington Post since 1987.

Her first was perhaps the most memorable — a nominee of President Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork’s nomination was rejected by the U.S. Senate after he vocally advocated for rolling back the civil rights decisions by the court from the 1960s and 1970s.

But in the years since, Marcus — currently the deputy editorial page editor for The Post — has seen a stark change in the court’s nomination, hearing and confirmation process, brought to a crescendo by the recent confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett eight days before a presidential election.

“There’s been a trajectory, from Bork on, on that less and less information of value is to be extracted during these hearings,” she said on Thursday. “The hearings that we just saw with Amy Coney Barrett really shows the limits of what these hearings can do. Every time a hearing rolls around, I dig out a quote from Justice (Elena) Kagan, before she was on the court, about the charade and uselessness of Supreme Court nominations. We’re seeing that more and more now.”

Marcus was the latest guest of Robert H. Jackson Center President Kristan McMahon during the center’s weekly “Tea Time With the Jackson Center” broadcasted live via Facebook on Thursday afternoon. McMahon began broadcasting these “teas” amid the COVID-19 pandemic to continue the center’s programming despite the limits on in-person events.

The confirmation of Barrett to fill the seat once held by Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been considered controversial due to both the timeline prior to the election as well as the shift in political ideologies presented by her appointment by President Donald Trump. Being a lifetime appointment, it also represents a court in which legal conservatives now hold a 6-3 advantage following Trump’s appointments of Neil Gorsuch in 2017 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, both of whom were confirmed along party lines.

Barrett’s confirmation was no different and she became, according to Marcus, the first court nominee confirmed without a single vote from the Senate minority.

“It’s a different world than we are living in confirmation than it was with Justice Jackson,” Marcus said in reference to the center’s namesake. “Even in the time that I’ve been apart of it, the notion that a Justice (Antonin) Scalia being confirmed 98-0, Justice Ginsburg, 96-3 — that is never going to happen again in my lifetime or ever again.”

The reason? The court’s presence as a “big political football,” Marcus noted.

“The poisonous and the ideological nature of the Supreme Court appointments have gotten so enormous,” she said.

The elimination of the fillibuster has also played a role in the partisan nature surrounding the court and its ideological shape. That began, Marcus noted, when Democrats during the Obama administration lowered the threshold for confirming lower court judges and executive branch nominees from 60 to 51 votes in the Senate.

“This was, I thought, a bad and dangerous idea for two main reasons,” Marcus said. “It encourages presidents and partisans to pick more extreme judges of either flavor. It was also 100% predictable that when push came to shove in 2017, the same nuclear option was deployed to lower that number for Supreme Court nominees.”

She added, “This is a very bad development. If you continue to need 60 votes, you would have different nominees than Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett. They would not be as originalist or as conservative. You would be able to extract more information from them if you were the Senate. There would be more Senators whose votes were up for grabs.”

The court’s conservative advantage now has generated a movement from liberal Democrats that, should former Vice President Joe Biden be elected on Tuesday, he consider expanding the size of the court from nine members to 11 or 13. Marcus does not see that happening.

“The likelihood that it will happen is very low,” she said. “It’s the Democratic Party which means it goes from Joe Manchin to Bernie Sanders. I thought that the vice president after he smartly ducked but did not duck smartly initially the question of if he supported court packing. He’s not temperamently a fan of that. He had said in the primaries that he had qualms about court packing.”

Biden’s compromise to the left wing of his party was that he would, if elected, appoint a commission to dig deeper into the issue.

“That’s Washington’s way of kicking a can down the road and not doing anything about it,” she said. “It would be a healthy thing for us to talk about to talk about terms limits and the feasibility of a constitutional amendment to expand the court, but I do believe that the size will remain at nine for the forseeable future.”

The Supreme Court, now back to full strength, will also review several important cases before the end of the calendar year. Decisions on religious freedom, the Affordable Care Act and election laws are due to divide an already divided country. Marcus fears for the result of the latter in particular.

“With the election cases, the question is really — which is more important: hard and fast rules that are predictable and set in advance or accomodating changes to the reality of the pandemic and the difficulties the postal service has had? Layered on top of that is who gets to determine that? The state legislatures or the federal government?”

Marcus explained that the U.S. Constitution protects a state’s decision to set its own election laws — those, already, are coming to pass with briefs already filed in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Alabama.

“Chief Justice (John) Roberts, who voted to allow the Pennsylvania state supreme court to boss around the Pennsylvania state legislature voted the other way when it was a federal district court trying to boss around the Wisconsin legislature,” she noted.

“I hope this election is not a close election,” she said. “I hope we are not enmeshed in litigation. It’s a really fascinating and very up-for-grabs area of law and I hope it doesn’t get made too much to soon. It would be very, very bad for the court and the country for us to find ourselves in another Bush v. Gore question where the question of the presidency is decided by the Supreme Court.”