Amos, empathy and full understanding are not the same thing. It is fundamentally wrong for a supreme court to take decisions on the basis of party politics. Their principal task is to discover, not invent, the law. There are many decisions of the UK House of Lords (now re-named "Supreme Court" in mistaken worship of the military might of the USA) that recognise that a change in the law might be desirable but that that is a matter for the legislature.

It is a shame upon an allegedly constitutional democracy that the SCOTUS should divide along political lines, and it undermines the US constitution. As I understand it, the reason for the time-differences between Congress and Senate elections is so that each house may control the dictatorship of the majority. That being so, the function of the SCOTUS is to determine not to make law, and certainly not to descend to party politics.

I do think that there is a lot to be said for requiring a greater majority than 5/4 to reverse a previous SCOTUS decision. The ability of the legislature to revise the constitution is much more trammeled than that.