Conservative expectations for 6-3 SCOTUS majority dissolve amid narrowly targeted consensus rulings

[Geee]

Just the News

The Supreme Court's decision this week to let stand a lower court ruling in favor of a transgender student's right to choose a bathroom consonant with gender identity is the latest in a string of rulings that have disappointed conservatives

 

 

Conservatives had been brimming over with hope that the confirmation of three relatively young, Trump-nominated justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — would cement a 6-3 conservative majority on the court for years, or even decades, to come. 

Barrett is a protege of late conservative legal icon Antonin Scalia. But despite Barrett's ascent to the high court to replace the reliably liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg following the latter's death last September, the current term has been characterized predominantly by unanimous or near-unanimous decisions with very few dissents from Trump-nominated justices. 

Former President Trump himself recently said that he was "very disappointed with a number of [Kavanaugh's and Barrett's] rulings," especially after he "fought very hard for them." But with the threat of Democratic court-packing looming, depoliticizing the court is a top priority of Chief Justice John Roberts, and it appears that the court's newest members are on board with his approach. 

According to one analysis, Brett Kavanaugh has, since his confirmation, sided with the court's majority in 85% of cases — the highest rate of any justice in nearly seven decades. Barrett and Gorsuch rank just behind Kavanaugh, with respective majority rates of 82% and 80%, the latter of which is tied with Justice Elena Kagan's rate.

Instead of dividing along the predicted "conservative" and "liberal" lines, the justices have issued unanimous, but narrowly defined, decisions in some of the court's most high-profile, politically-charged cases. (Not everyone is celebrating the broad-consensus-on-narrow-grounds tendency. Despite joining the unanimous decision in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, Justice Samuel Alito gibed that the court's decision was so narrowly targeted that it "might as well be written on the dissolving paper sold in magic shops.")