A reality-TV show about nine people who argue in a bunker, Unanimous, concluded last week. And soon the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court will wrap up their current term.

Coincidence? You, gentle reader, may be the judge of that. But for all of the similarities between Unanimous and the Supreme Court, there’s a critically important difference: Only one of them is televised. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong one.

At some point, Supreme Court TV may become a reality. During his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts said he was open to the idea. As an appeals judge, Samuel Alito voted in favor of TV cameras in the courtroom. What’s more, the Senate Judiciary Committee recently approved a bill to televise the Court’s proceedings, unless a majority of justices vote otherwise on a case-by-case basis. (Mercifully, it’s one of the shortest pieces of congressional legislation that you’re ever likely to encounter.)

Yet SCTV faces plenty of hurdles. In congressional testimony a decade ago, Justice David Souter announced his own stiff opposition: “The day you see a camera come into our courtroom it’s going to roll over my dead body.” Souter’s views are of course understandable–there is probably nobody in America who has benefited more from having kept people in the dark about his judicial philosophy.

The Supreme Court derives much of its legitimacy from its mystique–the public tends to view Souter and his colleagues as Delphic oracles who huddle in a temple and issue proclamations that are not to be questioned. Yet in recent years we’ve learned two things: 1) The Supreme Court is a fundamentally political institution that often disregards the plain meaning on the Constitution in favor of shadows and penumbras that only a few justices can discern, and 2) The original oracles at Delphi relied heavily on gas vapors–specifically, light hydrocarbon gases from bituminous limestone–to enter a trance-like state and announce their views.

The Supreme Court’s obsession with mystique became obvious to me six years ago, when I attended the oral argument in the Stenberg v. Carhart case on partial-birth abortion. (I was working on an NRO article about Don Stenberg, who was the attorney general of Nebraska as well as a candidate for the Senate.) Rather than giving reporters a seat in the chamber, the court forces journalists to sit behind a wall of pillars and curtains. A good seat allows you to see a maximum of perhaps three justices through the cracks, if you crane your neck properly. Experienced court reporters have a sense of what’s going on because they recognize the voices of individual justices; for rookies like me, a chaperone holds up a brochure and points to the picture of the justice who is speaking. I certainly don’t believe that institutions need to bend over backwards to accommodate reporters, but this felt like a cross between meeting the Wizard of Oz and punitive obstructionism. It is perhaps the strangest experience I’ve had while on assignment.

Justice Louis Brandeis famously said that sunshine is the best disinfectant, and at some level the justices appear to understand why it’s important for the public to have access to their deliberations. Transcripts and audio recordings of their oral arguments are already available. Television cameras seem like a logical next step–as well as a tremendous asset to a public that would gain much from acquiring a better understanding of the Supreme Court’s activities. Moreover, as Howard J. Bashman has written, cameras don’t seem to have interfered needlessly with Supreme Courts at the state level.

Yet many of the justices strongly oppose SCTV. Last month, Justices Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas criticized the concept when they appeared before a congressional committee. Thomas raised a privacy concern: “Some of the members of the court who have a certain amount of anonymity will lose that anonymity.” Thomas is of course not speaking about himself–he probably can’t walk down a street in Omaha without people either smiling or snarling at him. In this age of televised confirmation hearings, is it even realistic to talk about anonymity on the highest court in the land? Sam Alito has groupies, for crying out loud. Perhaps it would be better to accept that anonymity is something that justices lose when they join the Court. Just as you can’t bat in the lineup of the New York Yankees and expect not to be recognized, you can’t be one of the nine most important jurists in the land and expect to enjoy the personal privacy of the batboy for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Besides, if the justices are so worried about their privacy, then why do they deliver so many speeches?

Kennedy raised a separate concern. “It’s not for the Court to tell Congress how to conduct its proceedings,” he said. “We feel strongly that we have intimate knowledge of the dynamics and the mood of the Court, and we think that proposals mandating and directing television in our Court are inconsistent with the deference and etiquette that should apply between the branches.” That’s not a bad point–or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that’s not a bad ideal. In truth, however, the Supreme Court has never seemed terrifically reluctant to defer to anybody. If Congress were to pass and the president were to sign a bill requiring the Supreme Court to install TV cameras and let the tapes roll, there’s probably a decent chance the justices simply would rule it unconstitutional. If that happens, you’ll get to read about it in newspapers, in articles written by reporters who could barely see what was going on.

— John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and the author, most recently, of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America..