The Supreme Court's Conservative Revolution Is Already Happening
Everyone keeps waiting for the Supreme Court’s big right turn — especially this year. The justices have now begun their first full term with a 6-3 conservative majority, and the docket is full of culture-war issues, such as abortion, gun rights and religious liberty.
But in many ways, the Supreme Court’s conservative revolution is already here: The court hasn’t been this ideologically tilted in almost 100 years. Capturing the full breadth of this shift is difficult because the metrics we use to measure the court’s ideology are driven by hard-to-track factors like the types of cases the court takes up. For the first time in decades, too, a single justice isn’t holding the reins. The conservative justices can now assemble a majority more easily, giving them the power to push the court even further right.
That power may take some adjusting to — for both the public and the justices. The past term showed that there will still be plenty of room for disagreement on the precise path forward. One example was a high-profile religious liberty case where the most conservative justices took their fellow GOP appointees to task for issuing a ruling they saw as too timid. And the main priority of the liberal justices, now distinctly in the minority, appeared to be damage control. Moreover, some big decisions were taking place outside the public eye.
“Right now, I see two courts in action,” said Lee Epstein, a political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies the Supreme Court. “We see a standard Roberts court that leans conservative but has a serious amount of consensus and tries to look pretty nonpartisan. Then, within that court, we have an aggressive, socially conservative court led by the three Trump appointees plus [Justice Clarence] Thomas and [Justice Samuel] Alito.” Epstein told us that was likely why the justices decided to hear two extremely high-profile cases on abortion and gun rights this term — a signal that at least some conservative justices thought they now had the numbers to push the law to the right on those issues.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-roberts-court-vs-the-trump-court/