In just the past two terms, the Trumpified Supreme Court ended women’s constitutional right to an abortion, limited the state of New York’s ability to limit concealed carry firearms, struck down affirmative action in college admissions, blocked Joe Biden’s student-debt forgiveness plan, squashed the separation of church and state in a school-prayer case, gutted the Clean Water Act, and backed LGBTQ+ discrimination. This Supreme Court is so deeply emboldened to reshape society that one can’t help but be relieved when they don’t completely shred the Voting Rights Act or when the majority of justices—though not all of them—reject a fringe, right-wing legal theory that could blow up elections in America. – Molly Jong-Fast
This is not a normal court. – President Joe Biden
Those assessments match my own, although in several prominent cases two or three Republican-appointed justices sided with their Democratic-appointed colleagues. Do John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett comprise a new center for the court?
There may be a center, but it is not centrist, said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund. If the court's rulings can be unpredictable, "so is Russian roulette," she said.
While there were, in some eyes, ‘surprising’ liberal victories, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern note that those rulings 'had the effect of leaving the law in place, a set of status quo decisions dressed up as liberal “wins.”'
In other words, the court’s Republican majority aggressively pushed its extreme agenda, continuing to overturn long established rights recognized by Supreme Court majorities of the past, while declining to endorse the craziest, least supportable doctrines pressed by the conservative legal movement – though several justices were onboard for the crazy (in dissenting opinions). That’s not movement toward the center; that’s a distorted view created by the court’s control of the docket (as Steve Vladeck has argued).
The court accepted a bevy of radical cases, and then only sided with the radicals in some, but not all instances. Furthermore, as I have repeatedly argued, in recent years, the 5-4 and 6-3 decisions decided by the Republican majority are predominantly results-driven, unguided by any consistent, coherent judicial principles. The most extreme justices freely cherry-pick history and, when history is not on their side, they make it up. The former was true of Justice Thomas’s 2022 ruling striking down New York gun restrictions, while the justice took the latter route in his decision banning affirmative action (as Adam Serwer demonstrates).
President Biden, while acknowledging an aberrant supreme court, has been unwilling to embrace substantial reform of the court – such as expanding the number of justices and increasing Congressional control of the court’s docket (something that was in place “for most of the court’s history”). Each of these is politically out of reach in any case. They will have to wait for another time, when Democrats control the White House, the House, and a Senate unbound by the filibuster. That day will come, though not soon enough.