Move over Kardashians, Real Housewives, and Swamp People -- Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) have a plan to bring you the reality show you’ve been waiting for: the U.S. Supreme Court. Their Cameras in the Courtroom Act of 2011, forcing Supreme Court proceedings to be televised (with limited exceptions), gained Senate Judiciary Committee approval (11-7) late last week. While it’s nice to see bipartisan cooperation in the Senate, this bill combines appeal to values as superficial as a bumper sticker with real risks to the integrity of decision-making by one of our most important institutions.

The bill’s sponsors want everyone, not merely those who can attend in person, to see court arguments, linking that to broad values in governance. Grassley said, “Our Constitution requires that the government be accountable to the people.” Durbin added, “In a democratic society that values transparency and participation, there can be no valid justification for such a powerful element of government to operate largely outside the view of the American people.” These are appealing sentiments, but completely off the mark.

Contrary to the picture painted by Durbin and Grassley, courts are not merely another policy-making branch of the government that needs greater accountability to the public. Judicial decisions have retroactive effect; retroactive legislative decisions are prohibited. Courts are supposed to apply rules laid down by others; legislatures write those rules, subject to Constitutional limits. Because their roles are different, the institutions operate differently. Legislators meet regularly with people who have immediate interests in what they do and receive contributions from those people -- even in Chicago, that isn’t the way courts are supposed to work. Judges write opinions explaining the basis for their decisions within the framework of governing texts and precedents. Legislators are free to adopt new policies without explaining their consistency with anything that’s gone before.

Accountability and transparency are salutary checks on open-ended political power enjoyed by elected politicians, but they have little relevance to courts. The main benefit of televised proceedings is to satisfy curiosity. This is even truer for appellate arguments than for trials. The primary use of television will be to show odd moments, a particularly clever quip or misstatement. The real work of legal argument and analysis do not make for good TV. Gains, thus, are modest at best.

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On the other side of the ledger are real risks of expanding televised coverage. One might be called the Ito effect. Judge Lance Ito went from respected California trial judge to notorious panderer to the press during the O.J. Simpson murder trial, one of the first notable trials to be televised live. Not surprisingly, Ito became a household name, like reality-court stars Judge Wapner and Judge Judy, who were far better known at the time than the chief justice of the Supreme Court. With television inside the court, both judges and counsel will have temptations to play to the camera; the bigger and more immediate the audience, the greater the temptation, distorting the arguments and potentially the court’s decisions. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) unsympathetically observed that the risk of being “made fun of” or “quoted out of context . . . happens to the rest of us in public service all the time.”

The related risk is that increased public visibility of court arguments will lead to increased pressure on the court’s decisions. Courts are carefully insulated against public and political pressure. Federal judges have lifetime appointments and do not answer to voters to keep their job. Alexander Hamilton’s essay "Federalist No. 78" explains the insulation’s importance to the “steady, upright, and impartial administration of the laws.” As Hamilton notes, this is particularly critical when courts are asked to uphold Constitutional commands against encroachment by the political branches. Yet justices still may be sensitive to public acclaim or ridicule, sensitivity that will be particularly dangerous to impartial decision-making if tied to popular reaction that precedes the decision -- as would no doubt occur far more with televised arguments.

The problem is exacerbated because the attention will be intense in a handful of Supreme Court cases and almost nonexistent in the rest. The court takes a tiny fraction of cases it is asked to hear -- 70 to 80 cases a year from 7,000 to 10,000 petitions -- and only a very few generate significant public notice. Those are the cases where insulation from public pressure matters most and where the effect of public pressure is apt to be especially at odds with dispassionate interpretation of our Constitution. America’s fidelity to the rule of law is peculiarly at risk when the cameras and attendant pressures are trained selectively on those who are charged with protecting our rights and liberties against invasion.

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Cameras in the courtroom, of course, are not the end of the story. If Congress takes seriously the sentiments voiced by Durbin, Grassley and Leahy, cameras will be taken to places where the real work of the other branches is done -- to the Supreme Court justices’ conference room and to discussions among key advisers in the Oval Office, for example. Those are not within the reach of the current bill, but transparency has provided a ratchet for opening government proceedings in ways that have created problems for other decisions. There is no reason to see the current bill as the final step in opening decisions of the other branches to greater scrutiny and greater pressure to conform to the dominant political leanings of the day.

Even as a first step, the Durbin-Grassley bill presents an idea whose time should not come. A High Court TV show may have episodic popular appeal, but justice will be far better served by leaving court coverage to cooler, slower, and more deliberate media -- and leave reality TV to the Kardashians.