By james art Something besides politics decides cases in the Supreme Court.
During its last term, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 in 22 of 59 cases (37%). According to Empirical SCOTUS. Of these 22 cases, half were decided along ideological lines.
A case being decided “along ideological lines” means that the six justices in the majority were appointed by a Republican president and the remaining three were appointed by a Democrat.
Interpreting cases that are decided along ideological lines is difficult. These cases look like what we expect in government – a power struggle between blue and red, but the Supreme Court doesn’t follow the same rules as the other two branches of government.
Instead of party politics, something else decides the outcome of affairs.
It is impossible to remove all bias from every person, even a Supreme Court judge. Philip Byers, Halbrook’s chair of civic engagement, said the founders understood this. So the Framers did the next best thing—they introduced external and internal checks to prevent bias from destroying justice.
One way they can do that is through a lifetime appointment to the court, Byers said. By appointing lifetime judges, they have little incentive to campaign for office and will therefore be removed from party politics. In this case, job security is a bias check.
If the court has constitutional checks, then these 6-3 decisions along ideological lines probably aren’t the result of a Republican- or Democrat-run court.
However, the Constitution is not our only source of evidence for an apolitical court.
Jakob Miller is an associate professor of political science. He argued that presidents, statistically, do a poor job of appointing yes-men. In other words, presidents have not been able to put justices on the court who vote according to the president’s wishes every time.
Miller used the case Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye Inc. vs. City of Hialeah (1992) as an example of this.
Hialeah was a unanimous decision on religious freedom. That means all nine justices, both Democrats and Republicans, agreed on one of the most divisive topics — religious freedom.
If reds and blues agree on such a complex and politically charged topic, then there must be something outside of politics to inform the judges.
This leads to another, more complex reason why the Supreme Court is not politically biased: it infers that a justice’s political bias informs his judicial philosophy, not the other way around.
Think of it this way: as Christians, faith should play a role in our political philosophy, but politics should not play a role in how we do theology. Politics does not inform the Christian faith, but faith does play a role in a person’s politics. Thus there is some common ground between political philosophy through faith.
The same principle applies to the Supreme Court, but instead of theology and politics, it is legal philosophy and politics. That would explain why a fifth of the cases split 6-3 ideologically—those cases just happened when legal philosophy and political philosophy overlapped.
Brandon Dykstra is Chair of the Department of Kinesiology and an avid SCOTUS watcher. His argument against political judgment: the power of friendship.
Politics is brutal. A common consequence of our polar-opposite politics seems to be insult and slander.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. By this logic, we would expect any politically biased institution to follow suit. If the court decides cases based on politics, it should be as divided and messy as Congress.
However, the court is not full of people who hate each other because of politics. Instead, friendships between politically disparate people flourished.
Former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her referred to Scalia spokedescribed a time when he had to pinch himself during a trial to keep from laughing at a joke made by a judge with very different legal philosophies.
If the court is a blue-versus-red institution, it will not be accepted for a “blue” justice to laugh at any jokes made by a “red” colleague. Yet for all the chaos, madness and division of modern politics, there is camaraderie on the court.
The toxin of politics does not poison the friendship between judges, so this toxin is probably not part of the court.