The cover story of last week's Time magazine dealt with a topic near and dear to my heart: the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts' aristocratic visage graced the cover, alongside the words, "Does the Supreme Court Still Matter?"

Does the Pope like schnitzel?

Of course the Supreme Court matters. The author of the piece, David Von Drehle, says that "the Court's ideology is playing a dwindling role in the lives of Americans," insisting that the issues with which the Court deals every day -- abortion, segregation, prisoners' rights -- are being relegated to the realm of interesting philosophical discussions. "[T]he left-right division will matter mainly in the realm of theories and rhetoric, dear to the hearts of law professors and political activists but remote from day-to-day existence," he writes.

Except that he's wrong. Now, more than ever, the Court's opinions strike at the heart of Americans' lives. Von Drehle confuses the Court's deference to the states -- a project undertaken by the late Chief Justice Rehnquist and now continued by his successor -- with a court that takes a pass on deciding important issues. In the Court's last term, we saw an abortion ban without an exception for the health of the mother upheld, something that Justice Ginsburg, writing for the minority, called "alarming." More alarming was the dubious reasoning and evidence that led to the opinion: government witnesses claimed that there was never a medical necessity to perform an intact dilation and extraction ("partial birth") abortion, even though the medical evidence was overwhelmingly to the contrary. The right of women to have abortions is not theoretical. As an issue of discrimination, it is important to women: men will never, ever have to be told that they cannot do something to their bodies. As an issue of privacy, it is important to all Americans: what else will the state be able to prevent us from doing to ourselves in the comfort of our own homes, in the name of morality? (The War on Drugs comes to mind, but thus far, how we choose to alter our minds has been the only place where the government has stepped in to declare that it knows better than we.)

When Roberts was before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he said that he wanted consensus as much as possible on cases, so as to increase the authority of the decisions. A 9-0 or 8-1 decision has, legally, the same standing as a 5-4 decision, but as a practical matter, the former decision holds up better to scrutiny. The future will regard as more "correct" an opinion reached by all nine justices than a fractured opinion. Several important decisions in the last term were decided by 5-4 majorities, with The Usual Suspects on each side and Justice Kennedy breaking the tie. The notion of consensus is no longer an option, and it appears that, for the foreseeable future, we will have 5-4 decisions and a fractured court.

Justices Roberts and Alito also voiced their support for stare decisis, the philosophy that, all things being equal, contemporary justices should defer to past opinions and doctrines rather than re-invent them. In this term, however, we have seen precedents overturned in Gonzales v. Carhart and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. The former case overturned one of the requirements of Roe v. Wade; namely, that there must always, in any abortion-restriction law, be an explicit exception for preserving the health of the mother. In the latter case, the majority altered affirmation action jurisprudence to suggest that it is not the government's job to facilitate racial integration.

The justices' theoretical opinions will have far-reaching consequences. Take, for example, the decision in Morse v. Frederick, the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case. Chief Justice Roberts, in his theoretical analysis of the case, posits that one of the missions of a public school is "deterring drug use." This has very little support within the law, but now that it has been set in Supreme Court Stone, schools must necessarily make "deterring drug use" one of their goals. The justices attempt to create theories, which they apply to their opinions. I expect that this school of legal reasoning is supposed to make the process of adjudication more "scientific," but since each wing of the court (and, indeed, each justice) has its own theories about how the law works, this attempt to make the law more objective ends up creating 5-4 decisions.

It's alarming to suggest that, because the Supreme Court is out of touch with the people, it's irrelevant. The Supreme Court isn't elected by the people, and the justices will never be directly answerable to the people, so what's irrelevant is the notion that the Supreme Court's being out of touch makes it irrelevant. Regardless of what the American people feel about abortion, the Supreme Court will continue to interpret the law as it sees fit.

What is really important is for Congress to tidy up the law in such a way that the Court's opinion becomes irrelevant. The Court does not exist to provide relief in cases where Congress should act; the Court merely interprets the law in the absence of an explicit explanation in a law. Where the Supreme Court has decided "wrongly," it is up to Congress to step in and change the law. The Court's job is not to write legislation, merely to fill in the holes that Congress left in a law. If Congress fills in the holes, then the Court's opinion becomes moot. It is difficult to say that one branch of government is more important or unimportant than another; ideally, they would all work together.