Is There Any Hope for the Roberts Court?

Supreme Court Politics

 

I have always felt that the one saving grace for the US Supreme Court was that Chief Justice Roberts will do what is necessary to ensure that the "Roberts Court” reflects his judicial temperament and his place in history as a chief justice. I believe Roberts is a conservative leaning moderate, but is not so conservative as to allow the Roberts Court to become a retrograde body that decides 70% of the time against the will of 70% of the people on important issues like abortion, civil rights, voting rights, and gender rights. For example, I don’t think the Roberts Court will ever overturn Roe vs. Wade. The court under Roberts may may restrict some abortion rights (such as late term abortions), but will never make changes contrary to the majority views of the US citizenry. 

I recently read in the New York Times that justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh seem to be emerging as the swing votes on the Supreme court along with Justice Roberts, taking over the role of retired justice Kennedy. The website FiveThirtyEight noted this trend earlier in a 2019 post. The chart below from FiveThirtyFive shows the ideological make of the Supreme court before the death of Ginsberg.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-supreme-court-might-have-three-swing-justices-now/

This chart shows Kavanaugh closely aligned with Roberts, with Kavanaugh voting with Roberts 90% of the time.

This excerpt for the FiveThirtyEight post describes the relationship between Roberts, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch:

There isn’t a single “swing” justice anymore

Based on how they have ruled this year, there are now three justices who could reasonably be seen as “swing” votes of one kind or another: Roberts, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch. ... Roberts and Kavanaugh are more ideologically moderate than Gorsuch, but Gorsuch [is] more of a loose cannon. He joined the liberals in more closely divided cases than any of his conservative colleagues. That made him the “swingiest” conservative on the court ...

Here is another chart from the FiveThirtyEight post that shows how often pairs of justices voted alike:

I was extremely dissatisfied with all of Trump’s SCOTUS appointments, and disgusted with Kavanaugh’s testimony during his confirmation hearing. I assume all of you share this view with me.

But because SCOTUS appointments are life-term, we see many cases where a justice's true ideology doesn’t surface during confirmation hearings or evolves during their time on the court. So maybe there is tinge of hope that Kavanaugh and Grosuch will not always side with their conservative colleagues and turn the Robert’s court into the Trump court.

David

I know that my redeemer liveth. - Balthazar B.