Over the course of the past week, the Supreme Court has released a group of the most important decisions of this year’s term. Most of those decisions involved the federal government/Trump Administration as a party. As you probably have seen, the government won the majority of those decisions (ability of President to fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, ability of President to end “Temporary Protected Status” for certain migrants, ability of government to refuse to consider asylum applications from those who have not entered the U.S.), but also lost a few (birthright citizenship, ability of President to fire Federal Reserve Board Member Lisa Cook).
Many things about these cases are interesting and worth commenting on, but to me one thing is particularly fascinating: the three “liberal” justices (Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson) voted as a unified bloc in every case. This is in contrast to the six “conservative” justices (Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett). Those six may vote together most of the time (on politically significant cases), but they also sometimes break apart, as they did in some of these cases. They vote differently when they have principled disagreements as to the interpretation of a constitutional or statutory provision.
But somehow, the liberals never have any such principled disagreements. Instead, when a particular position in a case is important to the ability of the Democratic Party and its operatives to control government policy, the liberal justices can always find a way to support that position. When a Democrat holds the presidency (recently, Biden), the liberal justices can always find a way to uphold his actions. Here in President Trump’s second term, when a case challenging a presidential action comes before the Court, the liberals can always find a reason to strike that action down.
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