Summer is supposed to be the off-season for those of us who watch the Supreme Court of the United States like a spectator sport. 

The "boys of summer" who command our attention while school is out are supposed to hail from cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, St. Louis, and just this week San Francisco ... not Washington, D.C.  But this year, the final bang of the Chief Justice's gavel didn't end the Supreme Court season, it just signaled the start of extra innings.

It sure didn't seem that way at first.  In the days after the justices issued their last ruling for the term and skipped town for more comfortable surroundings, commentators were able to wrap up the High Court and its just-completed term into a nice, easy-to-understand package.

As long-time Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote in the New York Times: "It was the Supreme Court that conservatives had long yearned for and that liberals feared." 

Los Angeles Times correspondent David Savage echoed that common wisdom, explaining that the confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both just middle-aged, "signal[ed] a generational shift in power ... to the right."  President George W. Bush's "selection of the two justices appears to have cemented his legacy of a long-term conservative majority on the high court," Savage concluded. 

No one disagreed with this analysis — indeed, most were pitching it themselves — at least for the next month.

Then everything changed.  Some provocative commentary appeared and some unexpected news broke.  The last week of July shattered the certainty Supreme Court watchers and writers had about the stability of the highest court in the land.

The first shoe dropped on July 26, when the New York Times published an op-ed penned by Marshall University political science professor and biographer Jean Edward Smith.  Under the headline "Stacking the Court," Smith asserted that "there is nothing sacrosanct about having nine justices on the Supreme Court."  Smith continued by arguing that, "[i]f the current five-man [conservative] majority persists," then "it may require a political solution to set it straight."

What solution did the good professor have in mind?  Well, according to his column, "the election of a Democratic president and Congress [in 2008] could provide a corrective."  After all, "it requires only a majority vote in both houses to add a justice or two."  And, while Franklin Delano "Roosevelt's 1937 chicanery has given court-packing a bad name," as Smith well knew as a biographer of the 32nd president, such "a hallowed American political tradition" could be seriously considered.

Then the other shoe dropped less than a week later.  Just a month after Chief Justice Roberts adjourned the High Court for its summer recess, he was making headlines again.  But this time, the news had nothing to do with his work as the highest jurist in the United States or his role in what Robert Barnes of the Washington Post called the Supreme Court's "steady and well-documented turn to the right."  Instead, the news served as a "reminder that the [C]ourt can always be surprising" because now the youngest member of the Supreme Court and the youngest Chief Justice in more than 200 years had been hospitalized after suffering a seizure — his second.  The recurrence not only meant that Chief Justice Roberts technically had epilepsy, but it also meant the odds of another seizure were much greater.

Suddenly, the institution often thought to be the most stable of our three branches of government appeared much less so again.  In the span of a week, there had been at least two plausible scenarios raised that would undo what everyone just a month previously had agreed would be a conservative Supreme Court for years to come.

Two years ago, we wrote that "[e]ach summer America learns about the supremacy of five," and this past term was no exception.  It is no doubt true that the five justices so often known this past term as the conservative majority of the Supreme Court — namely, Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito — could, and are likely to, move the High Court's jurisprudence to the right for the foreseeable future.  But, this summer, America learned just how unforeseeable that future is because of the fragility of five.