Given the insanity so much in evidence in the Republican presidential nomination process, I doubt many progressives need to be convinced how vitally important it is that a Democrat occupy the White House come 2017.

Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC-Irvine, writing at TPM, reminds us of one very good reason we should keep our eye on the ball.

When the next President of the United States assumes office on January 20, 2017, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be nearly 84, Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy will be over 80, and Justice Stephen Breyer will be 78. Although many Justices have served on the Court into their 80s and beyond, the chances for all of these Justices remaining through the next 4 or 8 years of the 45th President are slim. Indeed, the next president will likely make multiple appointments to the Court.

He writes that in the most controversial cases “involving issues such as gun rights, affirmative action, abortion, money in politics, privacy, and federal power” it is the “ideology of the Supreme Court Justices, and increasingly the party affiliation of the president appointing them, [that] are good predictors of each Justice’s vote.”

Most people who pay attention to politics know that the next round of Supreme Court appointments, which the next president is likely to make, will have a profound impact on the shape of the polity potentially for decades to come. Some of the decisions made by the Supremes will impact how we are allowed to live our lives, what we can do, what we can’t do.

Is it an obvious point? Yes. But sometimes it’s good to remind ourselves why politics matters. Or, in the words of the late Marshall Berman, a professor I studied with briefly at the CUNY Graduate Center, “Whover you are, or want to be, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”