Wade last summer, a highly unpopular move that reshaped the contours of the midterm elections and created a historically wide partisan split in perceptions of the court. Then, of course, a five-justice majority overruled Roe v. The court has been moving steadily to the right for decades, but a paper published last year by social scientists Stephen Jessee, Neil Malhotra and Maya Sen indicates that it took a sharp conservative turn after the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, and Democrats - who usually tend to underestimate the court’s rightward tilt - actually noticed. But over the years, political science research has indicated that the court does shift with the public mood, and the justices have stepped back from the brink at moments when it seemed like they were about to buck mainstream public opinion in a major way.Īnd this year, the conservative justices are facing major headwinds. The high court is supposed to operate apart from politics, which means delivering unpopular opinions even in the face of public opposition. To be clear, this is not an understanding of the Supreme Court that any of the justices would endorse. Under this theory, public perceptions of the court matter to at least some of the justices and factor into how quickly they’re willing to reshape the law on controversial issues. ![]() This is the realpolitik view of the Supreme Court’s new center, which includes two extremely conservative justices - Roberts and Kavanaugh - who often vote together and have signaled over the past few years that they care about the court’s ideological reputation. Some conservative justices are worried about going too far So, what happened? Here are two theories for why Roberts and Kavanaugh delivered such a surprise - and what they mean for how we should think about the conservative majority going forward. Instead, 10 years after Roberts authored an opinion that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act’s other major section, the chief justice wrote that while Section 2 “may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States,” those concerns weren’t present in this case. Voting rights advocates were concerned that the Roberts court - which has a track record of narrowing the Voting Rights Act in most of the cases where the law has come up - would use the case as an opportunity to gut Section 2. Now, Alabama will have to redraw its map to include a second predominantly Black district. Last year, a panel of three federal judges threw out Alabama’s map, which was drawn by the Republican-controlled state legislature in 2021 with only one majority-Black district out of seven, because it was possible to draw a second majority-Black seat in a state with a population that is more than one-quarter Black. On Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberal justices, ruling that Alabama’s congressional map likely violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racially discriminatory voting practices or procedures. This term, the most conservative Supreme Court in modern history had the opportunity to gut the last major section of the Voting Rights Act. ![]() ![]() Chief Justice John Roberts has voted to roll back the Voting Rights Act on multiple occasions - but on Thursday, he joined the Supreme Court’s liberal justices in upholding a key section.
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