Something besides politics decides Supreme Court cases.
During its most recent term, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 on 22 of 59 cases (37%). According to Empirical SCOTUS. Of these 22 cases, half of them 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 other three were appointed by a Democrat.
Interpreting cases that are decided along ideological lines is tricky. These cases look like what we expect in government — a blue versus red power struggle, but the Supreme Court does not follow the same rules as the other two branches of government.
Instead of partisan politics, something else decides the outcome of cases.
It is impossible to remove all bias from any human, even a Supreme Court Justice. Philip Byers, the Halbrook chair of civic engagement, said that the founders understood this. So the Framers did the next best thing — they instituted external and internal controls to keep bias from destroying justice.
One way they did this was through lifetime appointment to the court, Byers said. By appointing justices for life, they have little motivation to campaign for office and therefore will be removed from partisan politics. In this case, job security is a check on bias.
If the court has constitutional checks in place, then these 6-3 decisions along ideological lines probably are not the result of a court run by Republicans or Democrats.
The Constitution, however, is not our only source of evidence for a non-political court.
Jakob Miller is an associate professor of political science. He claimed that presidents, statistically, do a bad job at appointing “yes-men.” In other words, presidents have been unable to put justices on the court who vote according to the president’s wishes every time.
Miller uses the case Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye Inc. v. City of Hialeah (1992) as an example of this.
Hialeah was a unanimous decision about religious freedom. This means all nine justices, both Democrat and Republican, all agreed about one of the most divisive topics — religious liberties.
If red and blue are agreeing on such a complex and politically charged topic, then there must be something outside of politics that informs the justices.
This leads to another, more complex reason the Supreme Court is not politically biased: it infers that a justice’s political leanings inform their judicial philosophy, not the other way around.
Think about 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 Christian belief, yet belief does play a role in a person's politics. Thus, there is some common ground between political philosophy through faith.
This same principle applies to the Supreme Court, but instead of theology and politics it’s legal philosophy and politics. This would explain why one-fifth of the cases were split 6-3 ideologically — these cases just so happened where legal philosophy and political philosophy overlapped.
Brandon Dykstra is the chair of the Kinesiology Department and an avid SCOTUS watcher. His argument against a political court: the power of friendship.
Politics is brutal. It seems that a common consequence of our polar-opposite politics is name calling and vilification.
Where there is smoke, there is fire. By this logic we would expect that any institution biased by politics would follow suit. If the court does decide cases based on politics, it should be just 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 different people flourish.
Former Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in her forward to Scalia Speaks, described a time when she had to pinch herself during a case to keep from laughing at a joke made by a justice with very different legal philosophies.
If the court is an institution colored by blue vs. red there would be little acceptance for a ‘blue’ justice to laugh at any jokes made by a ‘red’ colleague. Yet, despite all the chaos and madness and divisiveness of modern politics there is friendship on the court.
The toxin of politics is not poisoning friendship among justices, so that toxin is probably not a part of the court.
