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Je Suis Charlie
- Mar 2, 2013
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Republican appointments does not always equal Republicans get what they want. Most of the time justices try and keep politics out of the decision. You may be confusing judicial philosophy with political partisanship -- sounds like that is what you are doing
Quantifying the decisions with actual numbers does.
Is the U.S. Supreme Court Following a Political Agenda
Yet, jurisprudence scholarship does suggest that something has changed: the court is becoming more partisan. According to a 2009 study conducted by Richard Posner and William Landes, John Robert’s court has the most partisan bench in history. The rising wave of partisanship that has swept through Congress and the White House is matched by the growing polarization of the Supreme Court.
How the Supreme Court Justices Line Up Source: Pew Research Center
The growing polarization manifests itself in the long string of 5-to-4 decisions made by the Roberts Court. In two of the most recent courts, more than 20 percent of all decisions decided by 5-to-4 votes, and that means that the rulings that have the greatest potential to influence the lives of the American public are regularly decided by the narrowest margin. Furthermore, legal scholars consider those narrow 5-to-4 decisions to be the most political, while research shows that those rulings often overturned by later courts. Even more importantly, they do not convey the same moral authority as more unanimous opinions.
That concerns Chief Justice John Roberts, whose court has decided more cases by the 5-to-4 margin than any other. “I do think the rule of law is threatened by a steady term after term after term focus on 5-4 decisions,” Roberts told The New Republic‘s Jeffrey Rosen in 2006. “I think the Court is ripe for a similar refocus on functioning as an institution, because if it doesn’t, it’s going to lose its credibility and legitimacy as an institution.” During his 2005 confirmation hearing he also told lawmakers that he would attempt to implement “a greater degree of coherence and consensus in the opinions of the court,” citing former Chief Justice Earl Warren’s leadership in Brown v. Board of Education as an example.
The Roberts Court’s partisan, 5-to-4 decisions have upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s individual insurance mandate as well as an individuals’ right to gun ownership, limited class-action suits as well as an employee’s right to file a pay discrimination, and allowed unlimited corporate and union campaign spending. Votes on immigration, arbitration rights, voting rights, and the legality of legislative prayer were similarly divided.
Unsurprisingly, analysis conducted by Posner and Landes showed that the more ideologically polarized the Court is — meaning the greater the divide between the most conservative justice and the most liberal justice — the more often cases are decided by a 5-to-4 margin. This court is also the most conservative since the New Deal. Posner and Landes ranked 43 Supreme Court justices who served between 1937, when dissents were rare and justices rarely divided along party lines, and 2006, in terms of political ideology. They found that four of the five most conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and William Rehnquist– were sitting on the bench as of 2005, while the current liberal-leaning justices do no place in the top five. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the only sitting judge to rank among the top ten most liberal justices.
Read more: Is the U.S. Supreme Court Following a Political Agenda
That is still folks deciding that a decision is left or right as the basis for their assigning of values to the respective decisions.
I suspect the process might come down more to the notion that the liberal jurists are prone to ignoring the strictures of the Constitution BECAUSE the legislation that made the laws or the policies that implemented the laws were political in nature AND willfully disobedient to the Constitutional strictures. Therefore, any ruling that properly tries to weight the Constitutional commands in the analysis would APPEAR to be a partisan decision.
It is fallacious to believe that justices would never allow their personal biases to influence their decisions. They are just as human as you and I and that is reflected in the way they vote. When you see a preponderance of decisions were both sides agree then that is an indication that it was decided on Constitutional merits. On the other hand when you see split decisions that is an indication of a polarized court that is making political decisions.
What we have today is a SCOTUS that reflects Republican appointments to the bench since they have been in the Oval office for 20 of the last 34 years.
I uphold your right to your opinion and I reserve the right to my own.
