NOT WHAT YOU MIGHT THINK …
Now that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has decided all 72 of its cases in 2019, were the left-wing doomsayers prescient in their dire predictions of unwavering conservative decisions inevitably resulting from President Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the court?
To find out, we researched the extensive case data available at SCOTUSblog.com for voting outcomes and patterns in 2019. We focused our attention on the 20 most controversial cases decided by a 5-3 or 5-4 vote. Those cases amounted to 28% of the total 72 cases decided in 2019. The three charts below show how each justice voted in those cases.
Then we culled the 5-3 / 5-4 decisions for occurrences of justices switching ideological sides to swing the victory. We found that 13 of 20 or 65% of those decisions were decided that way. Contrary to the left-wing doomsayer predictions, 11 of 13 or 85% of those decisions resulted in liberal wins and only 2 of 13 or 15% resulted in conservative wins. The table below delineates the liberal and conservative wins garnered by justices switching ideological sides.
Lastly, in the table below, we assigned an ideological stridency or rigidity score for each SCOTUS justice in the liberal and conservative camps by calculating and color coding their willingness to compromise by switching sides in the most controversial 5-3 / 5-4 cases.
On average, when faced with the most controversial cases, conservative justices were willing to compromise by switching ideological sides more than four times as often as liberal justices. Looking specifically at Trump’s two supposedly “radical” nominations, Kavanuagh was no more ideologically strident than any of the liberal justices, and Gorsuch was the most ideologically flexible of all justices. If anything is worrisome, it’s the liberal ideological rigidity of Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, who didn’t cross the ideological aisle even once. But what else did you expect from justices nominated by the ultra-liberal community organizer, hope and change fraudster, and great divider in chief — Barack Obama.