Read the article if you like. It contains material like "My argument is that the Court is neither entirely political nor that it is entirely apolitical. I think we have to be a little more nuanced in the way we go about this. First, how do we define political?..."
July 7, 2026
As political as you want it to be.
I'm just answering the question posed in this New Yorker title: "How Political Is This Supreme Court?"
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46 comments:
To even ask the question reveals the New Yorker and it’s supporters (readers) are dumber than I imagined.
The article they chose reveals the grift. They specifically ask how political “THIS SUPREME COURT” is not how political the institution is, has been or should be. They are not interested in nuance or context. Restrict your opinion of SCOTUS to our artificial selection and THEN answer our question.
I’m disappointed that anyone played along with the carefully phrased question instead of mocking its specificity. This is simply more DNC-Media site prep for delegitimizing and expanding SCOTUS.
Is the theme this week commenting on paywalled articles? I chose to stop giving my money to the New Yorker folks a long time ago.
The "nuance" is that five Justices are supposedly political and four are supposedly voting the law so that the Court is not a conservative supermajority. Supposedly Justices Alito and Thomas are political as are Sotomayor. Kagan, and Brown-Jackson. Political means that one considers the policy outcome desired and twists the law to achieve that outcome. And the article is asserting that the three liberal women wist the law in favor of policy outcomes which are exactly opposite to those desired by Alito and Thomas. Hence in any case considered by the Court a 3-2 vote in locked in place but the other four are swayed by what the law says. This means there is not a conservative supermajority, according to the writer.
This is no different from the hundreds of articles by conservatives which say that Justices appointed by Dems are always fixed in favor of the Dem political position throughout their time on Court but those appointed by Republicans often squish and some have gone over to the dark side. But it's said in a nuancy way that lets it get published where Dems will read it.
Someday, I would like to read Althouse's actual take on this. But wishin' ain't gettin'', so I don't expect that. It would be interesting, however.
Regards,
Lori (reader_iam)
I can predict with 100% certainty how Brown-Jackson, the wise Latina, and Kagan will rule on every political case presented to the court.
All I know about nuance is that John Kerry told me a long time ago I was lacking in it.
Any left-wing publication must first acknowledge the 100% uber-political FDR 1930s court and the 1970s Roe/death penalty court. At most the Trump court is undoing what came before, but not undoing 2/3rds of what came before. Just the most obvious deviations from coherence.
The wordy quote mirrors how "fact checkers" reference "context" when they are trying to avoid the "facts" per se.
What issue of the New Yorker is this in? I can't find it in the July 6-13 issue. Is it in the regular New Yorker at all? Is it some blog appendix of the New Yorker?
I can smell the bullshit emanating from the title. If "political" means substituting short-term political ends for the language and intent of the U.S. Constitution and laws, the current court is about 5/8 "political."
Correction--5/9.
Each justice has a judicial philosophy and those philosophies tend to fall somewhere along the political spectrum from left to right.
I don't consider the court as a whole to be political because there are few decisions where I can cite specific substantive complaints about the analysis. Likewise, the court's critics always focus on how much they don't like the result. I have never once seen them address the analysis.
The beef is not that the court is political, but that it's political on the 'wrong' side. Packing the court with a few more liberals will fix that.
So the liberals always vote as a block to further the Democratic Party's odious platform and the conservatives split, more or less, fifty per cent of the time, but it's the conservatives who are political? Trump got handed losses in just about half of the "big" cases, that doesn't happen if the conservatives are "political."
Here is a good example on how far the liberal justices are willing to stretch their legal arguments to favor the Democratic Party. Remember Trump's hilarious joke about Haitians eating cats and dogs in Ohio? Justice Kagan does. After the Supreme Court "allowed" (read the statute!) Trump to terminate TPS as to Haitians, Kagan dissented:
The Haiti plaintiffs have yet another claim that is likely to succeed: that race entered into the decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation, in violation of equal protection. . . . [This claim] is more than plausible: Even putting the clear-error standard aside, the Haiti plaintiffs have carried their burden. The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President [that are] repellent and racially inflected. . .
Is this normal?
There is a practice in the press of referring to a justice's position on a given case (majority or minority) as a "vote." It has always rubbed me the wrong way, but I suppose it is an effective shorthand. It certainly makes everything the court does sound like an extension of "politics."
The MSM constantly lies about the SCOTUS and judicial decisions. They write propaganda, confident the boobs will never read the actual opinions or look into the cases in any detail. Nor will the average boob even keep track of who is voting for what.
Since the early 90s, the Democrat justices have always voted their politics and they vote as a bloc. In case after case after case. 3-0 or 4-0 for the leftist side of what of whatever issue they are rendering an opinion on. In one case, Scalia said their views were "untethered to the constitution".
You can point to one important case after another, where 1 or 2 Republican justices will cast the deciding vote(s) that gives the Democrats or the Left a win. It never happens the other way. Never does a Democrat justice "break ranks" and give the conservatives a 5-4.
In case after case, if its a left/right or D/R issue, you know exactly how the 3 D justices will vote, before they hear the arguments.
Typical MSM headlines on SCOTUS decisions:
Leftwing win : Supreme Court decides X.
Rightwing Win: Split court decides X. Democrat justice issues dissent.
A good example demonstrating why you never believe anything arising from a poll.
[start virtual italics]tim maguire said...
Each justice has a judicial philosophy and those philosophies tend to fall somewhere along the political spectrum from left to right.
I don't consider the court as a whole to be political because there are few decisions where I can cite specific substantive complaints about the analysis. Likewise, the court's critics always focus on how much they don't like the result. I have never once seen them address the analysis.
7/7/26, 8:22 AM [end virtual italics]
What he said!
Regards,
Lori (reader_iam)
“"My argument is that the Court is neither entirely political nor that it is entirely apolitical.”
It’s Schrödinger‘s Court. What it is depends on when and how you look at it, and who’s looking.
Political Correlation (PC)? A semblance or a feature. Maybe, baby.
I think we can all agree our side should win every Supreme Court case.
The liberal justices` judicial philosophy is basically that courts should decide cases in a way that promotes social justice, if at all possible (that is, if there's any plausible textual support for what they're trying to do). The conservatives are much more disciplined in that they do not accord themselves the right to substitute their judgment for what the elected branches have decided or what the Constitution says. Roberts is a special case however in that he shifts to outcome-centric mode whenever he gets worried that a decision in favor of the right will be perceived as partisan, thus bringing the court into MSM disrepute.
The Most Important Question Never To Be Asked: How political are the lower courts?
Is Article III of the Constitution a political statement or a legal one… or both?
"THIS"
Good catch, Mike.
Every federal judge ruling is preceded by “Obama appointed” or “Trump appointed”. Don’t have to do that with SCOTUS rulings, everyone knows which party appointed them.
The Court is 33.3% political. Of that one third, Jackson is 80% of the politicization because she hasn't the deep scholarship required to be anything but rabidly partisan. She's the worst appointee to serve since Roger Taney.
Yeah, we know the metric: if the decision is on the conservative side of the ledger, it's political, but if the decision is on the liberal side of the ledger, it's apolitical.
The court is completely political- all courts are.
Federal judges should stand for election like all other politicians.
The people who wrote our constitution made a mistake with the life-time tenure- they mistakenly thought it would lessen political pressure on court decisions but this is just flat out wrong- it rather makes it costless to make whatever decision you need to align with your political goals.
Federal judges should stand for election like all other politicians.
I favor a retention election for the Supreme Court. Maybe every 9 years, the American people ought to have a chance to eject a bad jurist. (You could stagger it so one Justice is up every year).
The court is completely political- all courts are.
Strongly disagree. Many jurists have a jurisprudence. Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter are two wonderful examples.
Black -- a huge liberal Senator -- wrote the opinion that said it was illegal for Truman to seize the steel mills. Truman went full Commie for a second and Black and the rest of the liberals called bullshit on him.
Scalia famously said it was a Constitutional right to burn the American flag.
Jurisprudence is a thing, and some judges have it.
The three democrats wise “ladies” are as partisan as you can get.
This is simply more DNC-Media site prep for delegitimizing and expanding SCOTUS.
Not really. The (liberal) scholar is arguing that five jurists are political...
Thomas
Alito
Kagan
Sotomayor
Jackson
All three liberals jurists are hit with the political smear. I think that's fair, although maybe less so for Kagan than the other two.
There's also some discussion of institutional politics. The example I would give there is the Chief trying to keep Roe v. Wade in place as long as he could. Once it was over and the bandaid was yanked, he joined the majority. That's why it was 6 to 3 instead of 5 to 4. They needed four to hear the case, and he would not allow it. That was very political. (The scholar seems to think that the Supreme Court trying to increase its own power is fine).
If you want non-political jurists, you need to nominate and confirm people with a jurisprudence.
For instance, Akhil Amar would be a great Supreme Court Justice. He's got a beautiful jurisprudence. I'm a big Amar man. Good review of his book here, by Cass Sunstein.
Richard Posner would have been a horrible Supreme Court Justice. Very smart, and very Republican, huge proponent of increasing Court power and imposing right-wing economic theory on the country. Very smart guy, Posner. Wrote a lot of books. There are Republicans who loved him, but you won't find a single pro-lifer who did.
Amar came to my law school for a conference, along with some other law professors. Yale guy, incredible. I read all his law review articles. I was like, wow.
His book on The BIll of Rights is fantastic.
Amar on unenumerated rights
Presumption of innocence and proof beyond a reasonable doubt are particularly interesting — proof beyond a reasonable doubt — because that very phrase post-dates the framing of the Constitution — it comes about a little bit later. Now for a couple of edgier examples — first one: the right of a criminal defendant to take that stand in his own behalf. That’s edgier because not only does the text not say that, but also at the Founding, no criminal defendant, none, had such a right in any court in America, state or federal. And today that’s a right judges cheerfully enforce in every court, state and federal. And that’s a right that judges across the spectrum think is a constitutional right. It’s a 9-0 right in the United States Supreme Court today. It’s not controversial the way Roe v. Wade is controversial. Let me give you a second one, maybe even edgier, because the Ninth Amendment after all says that there might be unenumerated rights and the Fourteenth Amendment after all talks about privileges and immunities of citizens that states can’t abridge even though that amendment does not exhaustively itemize these rights, privileges, and immunities. See, you might think there the text itself in a couple of places — the Ninth Amendment, the 14th Amendment — invites vigorous protection of unenumerated rights.
Roberts is the most political justice. The weird sisters are the most partisan. Kavanaugh is somewhat political. More than Gorsuch. The beltway brats aren’t too bad. Barrett waffles at times. She votes with the Weird Sisters at times to show she’s Independent. Alito strives to show his reasoning and does a good job of showing Roberts is a politician. Thomas is his own guy. He’s very conservative but defers to executive power when it’s a Republican president.
As long as the justices are human the court will be at least somewhat political.
Nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted. Implying judgment beyond a reasonable doubt. #HateLovesAbortion
The truth is usually somewhere in between partisan and extreme opinions. Usually writers convey that without having to telegraph their assessment.
"Political" is an ambiguous word. Does it mean "ideological" or "partisan" or "strident" or "dogmatic" or does it refer to modify opinions based on what is politically possible and acceptable to the country? Roberts is political in the latter sense which keeps him from being political in the first sense.
Everything is "get Trump" or "stop Trump" now. If the court withstands that to any degree progressives will tell themselves it's partisan. If the article isn't narrowly and stridently partisan that would be a surprise coming from the New Yorker.
mccullough at 2:32.
I think you are spot on, sir.
Roberts is a politician who is not running for office. He is the most "political" of the justices, in the Machiavellian sense.
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