Yes, It's Still a Conservative Supreme Court
The Supreme Court’s October 2020 term wraps up this week, and it wasn’t as bad as some liberals may have had reason to fear. This has led some observers to question if the court is as conservative as previously assumed. Conservative and liberal are hazy, elastic terms in everyday politics, so some allowances can be made. These terms are even less useful in the context of the Supreme Court, where the justices’ judicial philosophies don’t always reflect America’s partisan divides. But by any defensible standard, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is secure, if not fully operational.
According to preliminary statistics by SCOTUSblog, all six of the court’s conservative justices were part of majority rulings more often than their liberal colleagues. Leading the pack was Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who found himself in 97 percent of the court’s majorities this term. On the liberal side, Justices Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer each found themselves in the majority 80 percent of the time, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor trailed at 72 percent. (All statistics in this article exclude Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee and Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, which haven’t yet been released.)
Though some of the rulings had unpredictable coalitions, there is still evidence of a strong ideological split among the justices. Justice Amy Coney Barrett voted with her conservative colleagues between 94 percent (Kavanaugh) and 84 percent (Justice Samuel Alito) of the time. By comparison, she voted with Elena Kagan 76 percent of the time, with Stephen Breyer 71 percent of the time, and with Sonia Sotomayor just 65 percent of the time. Barrett and Kavanaugh were the closest pair of justices on the court this term, followed closely by Chief Justice John Roberts and Kavanaugh at 93 percent.
In recent weeks, these shifting coalitions have given rise to the notion that the 6–3 split is really a 3–3–3 split, with Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett at the court’s center and the court’s liberals and conservatives revolving around them. It’s an elegant model—and a flawed one. For one, a justice’s first year is an imperfect indicator of their long-term voting patterns. It’s exceedingly unlikely that Barrett will end up like Justice David Souter, who drifted away from the conservatives to become a reliable member of the court’s liberal wing. But as she becomes more familiar with the court’s dynamics, and as Supreme Court litigants become more familiar with how she approaches cases, some drift could happen in either direction.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/162878/barrett-roberts-moderate-supreme-court-term
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