Abortion; Affirmative action; Executive overreach; Free speech; Student loans; The Jab: All of these issues have been before the Supreme Court in recent years, and have all ended in a 6-3 vote — with all of the conservative justices voting in the majority.
The rulings have been monumental and have shifted the country to the Right. Decades of liberal jurisprudence have been rolled back. Conservatives are celebrating. These are some sweet, sweet legal victories. Liberals are certainly doing everything that they can to smear the court as illegitimate. It seems the court is now a conservative powerhouse — and ideally, it’s just getting started.
Now, on paper, a review of how judges voted in this most recent term shows that Democrat-appointed and Republican-appointed judges aren’t necessarily voting strictly along ideology lines in most cases.
Per ABC News’ Sarah Isgur, there has been a unanimous decision 50% of the time this term, at least one liberal justice has been in the majority 89% of the time, and there has been a 6-3 decision with all Republican appointees on the same side a mere 8% of the time.
“Voting blocs weren’t that different. If you only look at the non-unanimous cases, the 3 Democratic appointees voted together 24% of the time and the 6 Republican appointees voted together 17% of the time,” she added.
Obviously, some court cases are bigger than others. So those stats don’t tell the whole story.
This week alone, affirmative action was rolled back, free speech was protected, and the Biden administration’s student loan plan was stuck down. Justices in the majority systematically dismantled the three liberal dissenters in each case.
Indeed, the liberal dissenters seemed as if they were looking at another case altogether — to paraphrase Justice Neil Gorsuch’s rebuke in the majority opinion in the case of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. In that decision, the high court cited the First Amendment in ruling that Lorie Smith could not be forced by state civil rights law to design websites that run counter to her sincerely-held religious beliefs.
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“The dissent abandons what this court’s cases have recognized time and time again: A commitment to speech for only some persons and some messages is no commitment at all,” he wrote.
Of the decision, Law Professor Jonathan Turley said, “This will go down as one of the most important free speech cases in the history of the court.”
On affirmative action, Justice Clarence Thomas spent his time dismantling Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s entire worldview.
“Make no mistake: Her dissent is not a vanguard of the innocent and helpless,” he wrote. “It is instead a call to empower privileged elites, who will ‘tell us [what] is required to level the playing field’ among castes and classifications that they alone can divine…”
The student loan decision, while not upending the sort of wrongly decided precedent found in affirmative action or free speech, is still a gigantic deal.
Here too, the majority opinion and the dissenting opinion show how different the conservative vs. the liberal view of the Constitution truly is. It seems abundantly obvious that President Joe Biden and the Democrats forced the loan forgiveness through while knowing it was illegal.
To that extent, Chief Justice John Roberts even cited former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s observations that the president can’t cancel student debt.
As described by conservative commentator Jason Rantz, “Biden and the Democrats knew what they were doing was overreach. And the Liberal SCOTUS judges who chose ideology over the law should feel abject shame for their dissent, which is meant to divide.”
One could rebut that liberal judges tend to always choose ideology over the law — which is how you get judicial activism. Conservative justices haven’t always put up the best fight against those efforts. Readers should remember that it wasn’t too long ago that Roberts was delivering victories for President Barack Obama — so much so that he even developed a reputation as a liberal.
Now though, the court is beginning to undo decades of bad decisions, while at the same exposing the nonsensical ideology that has guided it.
So perhaps the reason for the freakout over the court this week is two-fold: The first reason is that Leftists can’t stand when things don’t go their way. The second is that after so many years of the court siding with a liberal interpretation of the Constitution, including when it had the votes to stave off the leftward lurch, the court’s move to the right now feels like a massive whiplash.
That has to hurt.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.