Even as the Left
wages
multifront
warfare
on the
Supreme Court
, the justices continue disproving the hostile narratives.
The most frequent complaint from Democrats and leftist activists
trying to bully
individual justices into submission is that the bench is biased and skewed far to the right. This accusation is not only hypocritical, given that Democrats didn’t complain about partisanship on the bench during years when justices were mostly left-leaning, but it is also easily debunked. Many of the court’s recent opinions show a bench filled with independent minds who agree or disagree with colleagues depending on the cases at hand, rather than pre-determined ideology.
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This term, for example, the Supreme Court has produced
only two opinions
, Samia v. U.S. and Jones v. Hendrix, with ideological splits in which the six justices commonly called conservative remained in a bloc against the three commonly called liberal. The other 50 cases decided so far this term have seen almost dizzying combinations of justices on each side.
Rather than the court being dominated by hard-line conservatives, it is the three most reliably conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — who have dissented from the majority most often. Nearly half the decisions, 23 of them, have been decided unanimously, which indicates the whole notion of a court riven by ideological war is nonsense.
A few major decisions are yet to be released, including 303 Creative v. Elenis, which asks whether the state can compel speech and force creators to violate their consciences, and Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, which could upend affirmative action admissions policies in public universities.
When those decisions are announced beginning on Thursday, the public should not fall for facile analyses casting each result in political, rather than legal, terms. The notable lack of predicted polarization on the bench this term is a sign the system is working well. Far from marching in lockstep toward some right-wing worldview, the justices are engaging each other and working to find common ground.
One such example of this balance is the repeated alliance against civil power that has formed between Gorsuch, appointed by President Donald Trump, and President Joe Biden’s appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson. In four opinions, Gorsuch and Jackson have teamed up to oppose government overreach.
In Tyler v. Hennepin County, for example, Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion agreeing with the court’s decision to side with a woman against Minnesota’s unlawful seizure of her home equity, but on different legal grounds than the majority cited. Jackson was the only other justice to sign this concurrence.
Likewise, in Polselli v. Internal Revenue Service, Gorsuch joined a concurring opinion by Jackson that argued the IRS’s no-notice powers, or its ability to obtain bank records for tax collection without notifying third parties, is more limited than the court majority indicated.
This jurisprudential alliance is not unique on this bench. Justice Amy Coney Barrett has sided with her liberal colleagues on a number of death penalty cases. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh have shown themselves just as likely to seek middle ground as to set hard conservative lines. In an Alabama
voting rights case
decided this month, they joined the liberals Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor in a 5-4 ruling that infuriated many conservative legal experts.
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Such jurisprudential flexibility is a testament to the justices’ dedication to the institution they serve. They are not boxed in by their own political preferences because those preferences have nothing to do, and should have nothing to do, with the job they have been given. Despite what the Left wants when its preferred justices have a majority, and excoriate when they don’t, a justice’s responsibility is to interpret and uphold the law as it is written. Each may differ in their interpretations, but that matters less than that they remain bound to the text of the Constitution and Congress’s statutes.
This is the Left’s real complaint against the court. Leftists want justices to abuse their judicial authority to impose a political agenda, not justices who limit themselves to the content and intent of democratically enacted laws. The public should ignore their hysteria, just as the justices themselves, to their credit, usually do.
