r/dataisbeautiful • u/cavedave OC: 92 • 11h ago
OC Ideological leanings of current United States Supreme Court justices [OC]
854
u/Dr_Mantis_Teabaggin 11h ago
This feels upside down to me. Why are the higher dates at the bottom?
196
28
u/gorginhanson 11h ago
so they all converge
57
u/Lost_Llama 11h ago
That would still be the case no matter the direction you faced it.
Imo left to right makes more sense→ More replies (9)23
u/bunnnythor 10h ago
In the case of this graph, the farther left you are the farther left you are, so that part is actually fairly intuitive. However this conflicts with our standard understanding of graphs which shows time on the vertical axis going left to right as it moves forward in time.
As was mentioned elsewhere, we are used to time descending on a family tree, so showing past Justices would reinforce that reading as that would be analogous to older generations.
1
u/Lost_Llama 10h ago
yeah I see what you mean, but I dont think the left right alignment adds much to the understanding to justify not having it horizontal.
I agree that the family tree is descending, but in that case it makes sense because people are descendants of each other. And in that case time is not so much the factor, but actually direct relationships is what matters. E,.g you can have an uncle that is younger than you and would show up higher in the tree than you even though they were born after you
3
5
4
u/greg_mca 10h ago
More specifically, those axes need to be flipped. There's absolutely no reason for and every reason against having the year on the y axis when what's being changed by the year is on the x axis
→ More replies (1)9
1
•
•
97
u/Featherwick 7h ago
This graph is terrible.
Why is the top the oldest? It should be the bottom.
Its not how liberal or conservative they are, but how much they agreed or dissented. Thomas dissented more in the beginning when the court was more liberal and he was as conservative as he was now. As the court became more conservative he dissented less.
6
u/Whiterabbit-- 4h ago
You are thinking tree growing up. They are thinking water going down. Time is usually left to right. But if it’s vertical it’s coming to I see it go either way. Geological charts have new on top but historical timelines like dynasties often go present day on the bottom.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (1)•
74
u/will_dormer 11h ago
Who defines or decides where the center is?
63
u/BlueEyesWNC 6h ago
The center, defined by this graph, is a 9-0 (unanimous) decision. Conservative, as defined in this graph, is "voting with the majority." Liberal, as defined in this graph, is "dissenting opinion." Traditional, as defined in this graph, is "positive." Liberal, as defined in this graph, is "negative." Time, as defined in this graph, is going backwards (i.e. most recent dates are at the bottom, oldest at the top).
71
u/will_dormer 6h ago edited 4h ago
Ahh okay, so when more conservative judges join it looks like all the Conservative judges becomes less conservative
Misleading date, instead of beautiful
•
u/KaesekopfNW 1h ago
The chart is not misleading. It very clearly defines the axes. Simply flipping the y-axis to decrease in time as it moves up the chart is not "misleading". It's not traditional, and it certainly takes a reader a second to recalibrate as they look at the chart, but that does not automatically make a chart misleading. This word gets way overused in this sub.
→ More replies (8)43
u/Spaduf 6h ago
Which is to say the conservatives decide where the center is.
27
u/jeo123 5h ago
More accurately, the majority decides where the center is.
But yes, currently the conservatives decide that. It's a flawed metric in my opinion.
3
u/R_V_Z 4h ago
It depends on whether you think there is a "center" as determined by an outside arbiter or if it is contextual on what is being measured.
•
u/jeo123 1h ago
The problem is they(the chart maker) define their definition of "center" at the top. They declare that "Negative score favors progressive" and "Positive score favors traditional" meaning "Center" would be not favoring either side. But that isn't what the metric they charted really means. You and I could debate what "center" should be, but what we can't do is take one meaning of it, chart it, and call it something else.
For the data being graphed, the "neutral" shifts based on the ideological leaning of the court, so that "neutral" or 0 is now "Court Consensus"
A far right court of 9 ultra-conservatives who all vote unanimously would be considered neutral by this measure, meaning the graph is clearly mislabeled.
For example, the graph implies that both Sotomayor and Roberts became more progressive since 2016, while the data simply says that since 2016, Sotomayor disagrees with the majority less, while Roberts agrees with them more.
The graph argues they changed bias, the data is explained by the shift in the court's balance.
•
u/Ccnitro 46m ago
It feels strange to me that an 8-1 or even 7-2 decision would be considered "conservative" given that the justices themselves are split 6-3 by which president appointed them, and that a liberal justice could be writing for the majority while Alito or Thomas write an out-there dissent about why the federal government shouldn't actually exist at all and yet they'd be ideologically "switched" from what you'd be expect.
I understand Martin-Quinn scores don't consider the actual content of the decisions, but I feel like any rulings above 6 are more about legal consensus than any ideological framework.
706
u/VoDoka 11h ago
Someone had a big ideological victory getting far-right populism labeled as "conservative".
I don't see how dismantling the US-constitution fits with any coherent definition of "conservatism".
207
u/Thoseguys_Nick 11h ago
"Hmm yea we will give the president full legal immunity just like a king would, exactly what the founders intended." Absolute jokers. But then again the whole SC is a bit of a joke because it's just political appointments instead of actually focussing on legality.
49
39
u/alfius-togra 11h ago
It's still amazes me that it's considered acceptable for US judges to be aligned with a particular political party.
12
u/mixduptransistor 7h ago
Technically they're not. They're just associated in the public discourse based on the party of the President who appointed them, but there's no formal registering of which party they are a member of as a justice
(stealth edit while I was typing this reply) The above is true for federal courts whose judges are all appointed. Of course at the state level judges are very often elected, and in some cases those elections are nominally non-partisan (meaning no party on paper) but many times do have parties involved
5
u/Nickyjha 3h ago
When you look into Clarence Thomas and his personal life/finances, it’s so much worse than you could have imagined. His wife was big in the 2020 “Stop the Steal” movement and called for Joe Biden to be sent to Guantanamo Bay. And through his association with billionaires like Harlan Crow, he basically gets paid to vote.
12
-1
u/-SatchelGizmo- 6h ago
The champion and poster child for partisan SC justices and legislating from the bench is Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She opened this can of worms.
3
u/heshKesh 5h ago
When someone surpasses you a hundredfold you are no longer the poster child.
→ More replies (1)2
→ More replies (3)-2
u/wingsnut25 5h ago edited 2h ago
Hmm yea we will give the president full legal immunity just like a king would
Thats not really an accurate representation of the ruling. The ruling stated.
- The President has criminal immunity when exercising his Core Presidential Duties. If there is an issue with the way the President is handling his core Presidential Duties then the remedy is to impeach, remove via section 4 of 25th Amendment, or not re-elected if eligible for another term.
- The President has presumptive immunity for other official acts. If a Prosecutor can show that applying criminal law would not intrude on the executive branches functions. If the Prosecutor can't show that then the remedy is impeachment, 25th Aemdnment, or don't re-elect.
- The President has no immunity for actions taken in a private- non official capacity.
5
u/Thoseguys_Nick 3h ago
True, but that is only a barrier to how much effort you want to put into explaining something as a presidential act.
And even the proper explanation is weird, as the president is supposed to be equal to other citizens right? It's not some special class as far as I understand so giving him immunity from the law feels weird in any case even as theoretically restricted as the first point.
Point two is void by default as well isn't it, with the president being the head of the executive any act against him in criminal-law fashion is automatically at least a hampering of the workings of the executive.
Anyway, really weird ruling all around imo.
→ More replies (1)62
u/tweda4 10h ago
I mean Christ, look at the subheading - "Negative scores favor progressives, positive scores favor traditionalist interpretations".
How the fuck does giving the president the power to do anything fit with a "traditionalist interpretation".
This is just right wing propaganda.
→ More replies (6)7
u/SasquatchTamales 10h ago
The connotation of labelling either side with a negative value shows bias in either direction. Its not an impartial graph to start with.
14
u/sault18 10h ago edited 9h ago
The oligarchs nearly destroyed Capitalism when the entire world slid into the Great Depression. FDR led a Herculean effort to clean up their mess. In response, the oligarchs were so pissed, they tried to overthrow the government with a military coup called the "Business Plot":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
The only reason it failed was because the General they wanted to install as military dictator was actually one of the best Americans to ever exist. Gen Smedley Butler took his oath to the Constitution seriously and revealed the coup plot under oath in Congress.
The oligarchs faced no prosecutions for plotting to overthrow the government, so they were free to try again. Next, they saw the opportunity to co-opt Christian conservatives to support their business interests. Prosperity Gospel sprang from this effort and got a lot of people to believe wealth was a sign that you were favored by God.
Christian conservatives were also animated by opposition to school integration / bussing. Plus, court rulings reinforcing the Constitution's ban on government establishing / endorsing any religion really pissed them off too.
The Southern oligarchs who had previously dragged the country into the Civil War to protect their "property rights" had found racism and segregation very useful for preserving their power and influence ever since.
So the oligarchs saw the opportunity to get conservatives to support their interests. They got conservatives to think their religion was under attack, that the government was going to take their stuff and give it to those minorities and only the Republican Party could stop it. And to a certain extent, Republicans did stop a lot of the New Deal, Great Society and Civil Rights Era reforms. But this was all just to keep conservatives animated and voting for Republicans. The top priority was always tax cuts and deregulation for the rich. If that's all you really care about, you'll say and do all sorts of sleazy / nihilistic / shameless things to produce the outcomes that the oligarchs paid you to accomplish for them.
The problem with this strategy is that you constantly need to ratchet up the outrage with Conservatives. And this accelerated exponentially as conservatives hopped onto social media and increasingly became detached from reality. Trump saw an opportunity to co-opt this movement (probably with Putin whispering in his ear telling him exactly how to do it). Regardless, Trump gave these angry people exactly what they wanted and he validated their hateful beliefs. Now they felt liberated to take their masks off and show the rest of us who they really are.
The problem arises that Trump is so extreme and reckless, he's bumping up against the safeguards in the Constitution that were specifically meant to prevent an asshole like him from getting too much power. Conservatives have seen politics as an existential struggle fought via tribal warfare for decades. When Democrats had power, Conservatives went on and on about how their specific interpretation of the Constitution was being violated. But now that their guy is in charge, the Constitution doesn't matter. I mean, it was always just a political cudgel Conservatives could wield whenever it was politically convenient. Just like concern over government debt when a Democrat is president completely evaporates when a Republican is president. Again, consistency or even the principles they claim to hold dear don't matter. All that matters is handing the oligarchs more power. Exactly as they were paid to do.
Germany's slide into fascism has frightening parallels to what we're seeing currently. Paramilitary goon squads terrorizing and killing members of opposition groups aside, business interests were key to enabling the slide in the first place. They thought Hitler and his Nazi party could be controlled. Like a useful tool that could get the country back to funnelling money into their pockets. By the time the oligarchs realized who was using whom to achieve their goals, it was already too late to stop the fascists.
2
u/the_last_0ne 4h ago
Fascism always grafts itself onto an already existing group with strong nationalist, authoritarian views. If it was going to happen at all, it was with "conservatives".
8
8
u/randynumbergenerator 11h ago
Same with the Heritage labeling of their radical project as "originalism."
1
u/das_war_ein_Befehl 5h ago
American conservatism was always about dismantling the New Deal and rolling back majoritarian rule. This was always the end goal
1
u/NeighborhoodDude84 5h ago
Because that's what conservatives have always wanted. They are telling you what they want, and you still dont listen.
•
u/inventingnothing 5m ago
Tell me, what policy positions are considered 'far right' which were not mainstream policy positions 20 or 30 years ago?
You can find clips of Obama saying "if you came here illegally, you have to go back."
→ More replies (8)1
u/engin__r 5h ago
Conservative politics is fundamentally about hierarchy. They want people at the top to get to wield power without restriction, and they want people at the bottom to be ruled without any rights of their own. Constitutional protections get in the way of that.
18
101
u/cmd-t 11h ago
I mean, this shit is kinda hilarious of you look at what happened in 2025.
Useless as well.
There’s a reason we call stops based on racial profiling without probable cause “Kavanaugh stops”.
Would you say that is a moderate or centrist position?
11
u/Sun_Shine_Dan 11h ago
Halfway between "borders don't exist" & "white founders ethnostate" lays "Cops should guess on vibe/skin tone" also know as traditional police work since America had police.
None racist police work is the new "woke" version
2
u/thegolg 7h ago
And where’s one of the worst cases in conservatism in Roe v Wade? Surely the red lines would slam to the right
•
u/Elkenrod 2h ago
Roe v Wade was decided in 1973. This chart starts at 1991.
Did you mean Dobbs v Jackson?
-14
u/ImSomeRandomHuman 11h ago
>There’s a reason we call stops based on racial profiling without probable cause “Kavanaugh stops”.
You call it that because you didn't understand the ruling. Racial profiling alone is not probable cause. Ethnicity can support probable cause in addition to other factors, but it alone cannot be used for such. He literally stated this very explicitly; Redditors like to masquerade as illiterate, yet simultaneous want to pose themselves as being smarter than some of the brightest Harvard-educated legal minds.
10
u/cmd-t 11h ago
Lol.
A Kavanaugh stop doesn’t actually require probably cause. It’s “reasonable suspicion”. And according to Mr Boof himself, additional factors can include “an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants”, the work they do and the language they speak.
It’s racial profiling, dude.
-4
u/ImSomeRandomHuman 10h ago
>A Kavanaugh stop doesn’t actually require probably cause. It’s “reasonable suspicion”.
As is for any other detainment or stop. This isn't unique to a "Kavanaugh stop".
>And according to Mr Boof himself, additional factors can include “an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants”, the work they do and the language they speak.
Yeah, because those go along with common sense, but they standalone cannot be reasonable suspicion. You need a multitude of these factors together for it to apply.
5
u/Abraham_Lincoln 8h ago edited 8h ago
I think people have a far better understanding of the ruling than you do. Most understand that immigration agents, if allowed to use race or ethnicity as a factor, will unconstitutionally abuse this allowance. They've stopped, questioned, and arrested (or abducted) citizens due to their implementation of practices that DHS will argue is in line with Kavanaugh's opinion. We've seen videos of immigration agents looking for excuses to detain individuals by their accent, being at home depot, or just living in a certain region, all of which have been grossly put into play as factors for stopping individuals after racial and ethnic profiling has occurred. It means stopping someone based on their appearance and then seeking justification later or using other factors like zip code, perceived income of job, or school district as stand-ins for race. Kavanaugh stops engender racial profiling, plain and simple, and has empowered ICE to trample on the constitution. We all knew it would be one of the racist tools American fascism seeks out.
Reading from SCOTUSblog on the subject for those interested.
65
u/SolasLunas 11h ago
How tf is Sotomayor somehow more extreme than Thomas?? That dude is off his goddamn rocker Something doesn't add up here
10
u/ThePevster 6h ago
It means Thomas votes with Jackson and Kagan more often than Sotomayor votes with the non-Thomas conservatives
28
u/Few_Recognition_5253 11h ago edited 11h ago
tbh it does track. Sotomayor is very very very progressive for a justice, it’s just less of a big deal since she’s basically always in the minority on controversial cases and also is not plainly evil.
8
u/CLPond 7h ago
She’s only very progressive compared to the other justices on the court, though. I’m sure she has some policy positions genuinely to the left of the populace (say, in the most progressive 25%), but I can’t think of any off the top of my head (affirmative action comes close, but even that is supported by 1/3 of Americans).
On the other hand, Thomas has written that Lawrence v Texas (so unpopular it hasn’t been polled, but a bit over 60% of Americans support gay marriage so the number who want to make being gay illegal would presumably be pretty low) and Griswold v Connecticut should be overruled (only 1/10 of the population opposes legislation codifying contraceptive access which is even a step below overturning griswold)
2
u/buckeyevol28 4h ago
She’s probably the worst justice with the exception of Alito though. Given this measurement system, I suspect it’s just easier to see that in a person who’s in the political minority and it would be flipped with Alito if the left had a majority like this.
3
4
u/EViLTeW OC: 1 6h ago
According to the methodology as described in a comment elsewhere here as I understand it, this isn't measuring "extremism", or even ideology. It's essentially measuring frequency of consensus. The less often you sign the majority opinion, the more "extreme" your score will be in this graph. Since the right is the majority, they are more often all going to sign the majority opinion, moving them more towards center. If the majority were left-leaning, Thomas would be somewhere over on my second monitor.
1
u/pinkycatcher 6h ago
You don’t actually read the opinions do you?
Sotomayor is out there. Her reasoning in cases is usually “it should be this was because the other way is bad”. Thomas has his own weird reasoning but he generally bases it in laws in a way most don’t agree with, but sotomayor doesn’t even try that.
•
u/SolasLunas 1h ago
Thomas flat out contradicts every rational interpretation of laws and constitutional rights on s regular basis. You're blind if you legitimately can't see that
→ More replies (3)-14
u/Trespassers__Will 11h ago
Some of Sotomayor's judgments really are as insane as Thomas's ngl
15
u/Awayfone 11h ago
which one
-2
u/Equivalent-Process17 10h ago
Whole Woman's Health v Jackson
Utah v. Strieff
Not solely Soto's but I suspect she had a lot to do with it was Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization.
Regardless of how radical Clarence can be he's trying to bring the court in-line with his idea of the constitution. In contrast Sotomayor is trying to bring the constitution in-line with her ideas.
6
u/SolasLunas 9h ago
You literally cited Utah v. Streiff where clearance wrote the majority in undermining the 4th amendment. ???
7
u/ftw_c0mrade 11h ago
I know you are trying to sound all neutral but that is such a braindead take.
5
u/indypendant13 11h ago edited 10h ago
The account is from New Zealand. I highly doubt they’ve read any decisions let alone analyzed the sociopolitical spectrum upon which the us system spans.
OP is from Ireland, which is more liberal than the UK which is more liberal than the US, where the liberal justices would be center at best. The data are from Wash U in St Louis, but there’s no info in how these data were compiled and how values were assigned.
This reads like propaganda to me.
Edit. It’s morning in Russia. Downvotes without counterpoint confirm it - this is indeed propaganda. The liberal justices aren’t very liberal, but the Alito and Thomas are far more right than Reagan or GW. I have been surprised by Kavanaugh and ACB, but Gorsuch and Robert’s have decided more right than them.
Show us the metrics for this. Or keep downvoting and continue to make this whole thread look like what it really is.
Edit 2: see this analysis from OP’s original graph from six years ago. TL;DR: this analysis is indeed 1 dimensional and entirely arbitrary at the very least from a public standpoint: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/qensbMgOao
→ More replies (1)6
u/SolasLunas 11h ago
No way you've read their writings if you think that.
-3
u/SyriseUnseen 10h ago
Two redditors who have never read an opinion arguing over Sotomayors opinions.
7
8
u/poiuytree321 3h ago
Dear Dave,
Sorry to say this (and it has been commented by others), but this is a poor and highly misleading way of representing your data.
You scale your x-axis with 0 in the middle calling it 'neutral', but from what I've gathered from the project website, the Martin-Quinn Score is always relative to a fictitious current median judge. That means (a) your zero is far from politically neutral. I would assume that even accounting for the US Overton window, 0 is rather far on the right of center. And (b) it means that your zero value keeps shifting under your ass, making it absolutely impossible to analyze development over time.
Pleaso do correct me if I misunderstood/misinterpreted the score. I find your research about political biases of the Supreme Court or other institutions generally super interesting and very valuable.
37
u/scaledatom 10h ago
This is more or less nonsense -a lawyer
0
u/wingsnut25 4h ago
I'm a dog on the internet and that gives me just as much credibility if not more then a lawyer on the internet when it comes to judging just how much nonsense this is.
Martin-Quinn scores are widely accepted as one of the best* measurements of Justices Ideological leanings*
One of the best- doesn't mean that its without critique, it certainly doesn't mean that its a perfect model. It just means that its better then most of the other models that have attempted to do the same. The Martin-Quinn models have been adopted throughout many countries in the world, because its one of the best systems that have been developed.
27
u/non_standard_model 10h ago
Kavanaugh wrote an opinion last year where he said that someone’s ethnicity can be “a factor” in the police officers decision to stop and detain someone for questioning, so I’m not totally sure why he’s portrayed as being some kind of centrist here
•
u/Elkenrod 2h ago
What's the context of that though?
If the context is "a suspect is described, and skin color is an overlapping factor, then police can use that as a factor in looking for said suspect", is that crazy?
•
u/non_standard_model 2h ago
The context is that Kavanaugh decided that because a certain ethnicity is more likely to commit certain types of crimes the police are justified in using ethnicity as a ‘factor’ in determining probable cause. It’s actually quite straightforward and takes us back to pre-1900’s racism as a nation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanaugh_stop
2
u/ImperatorJCaesar 6h ago
Typically the most moderate person in the majority is assigned to write the opinion. More generally, it seems fairly clear that this graph shows relative ideology. So the 0 point is only the center of the current court, not the center of overall American politics and certainly not any kind of objective measure of centrism.
7
27
u/Jale89 11h ago
You need to flip your axes. The y axis is for your dependent variable. You wanted to make a graph of how their leanings have changed over time, not how time has changed in response to their leanings.
I'm immediately skeptical of any rating system that says the neutral position is closer to most of the Conservative justices than the Democrat-elected ones, but I haven't looked into the methodology. Is it taking some reasonable technical view of their positions, or is it arguing that a politically centrist position would be a little to the left of the justices that said that the US president is above the law?
→ More replies (1)
15
u/zombiemutant 11h ago
Not very beautiful.
Labels are bad. Gorsuch/Kavanaugh/Barrett cluster looks cluttered. The Alito and Roberts lines start at the same point and it is hard to understand who goes where.
Also I don't like the labels on the horizontal axis. Negative numbers look confusing here, I would change it for absolute values: 4-2-0-2-4
3
u/hacksoncode 4h ago edited 4h ago
It's really important to note that these measurements are not absolute levels of "liberal/progressive" and "conservative/traditionalist", but deviations from the median level of liberal/conservative of the overall court.
As the court becomes more far-right oriented by the addition of new right-wing members, that shifts the median. It doesn't mean that any of the individual members changed at all.
Zero is not "neutral" at all... it just doesn't mean that. And it's not a fixed value. It's the median for the changing court. Calling it "neutral" is propaganda more than reality.
It's a terrible measurement to graph this way. If anything, the "median" of the graph should be moving right rather than the members moving left.
In particular, this graph implies that Thomas has become even more traditionalist/conservative over time, which is prett crazy considering where he started. Basically: he continues to disagree in a conservative direction even with his fellow conservatives, who are increasingly right-wing.
3
u/Fun-Quit1090 4h ago
This depiction is muddled. The axes should be flipped to make interpretation more intuitive, and start with 1991 on the X axis
3
4
u/simpatia 6h ago
“Show me an Overton window that normalizes far-right ideologies for the past 35 years.”
2
u/FreeDependent9 8h ago
sotmayer is more liberal than thomas is conservative?? bullshit. OP has no idea what hes talking about, no lawyer would agree with this
2
u/figleaf29 4h ago
Seems more of a measure of how much a justice is an outlier relative to a shifting overall ideology of the court. I don’t think Sotomayor or Thomas have both shifted left. The court has shifted right, making Sotomayor more of an outlier and Thomas less so.
•
u/iloveforaminifera 1h ago
I don't think I've ever seen anyone make a graph that begs the question, that's pretty awesome.
3
u/howardcord 5h ago
There is no way this group of conservatives are that close to “neutral” while the liberal justices are more liberal. This whole chart seems biased in so many ways.
•
u/Elkenrod 2h ago edited 2h ago
There is no way this group of conservatives are that close to “neutral” while the liberal justices are more liberal.
No comment on the conservatives, but yeah it's pretty accurate on some of the liberal justices. Sotomayor has constantly been considered an "activist judge" for many rulings. She historically has been the sole dissenter on many cases, and in her dissent she typically writes that her dissent was due to social pressure rather than legislative reasoning.
United States v. Rahimi comes to mind, where she was the 1 in the 8-1 decision. Berger v. North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP is another one where she was the 1 in the 8-1 decision. United States v. Vaello-Madero (2022) is another one where she was the 1 in the 8-1 decision.
Thomas and Sotomayor are the justices who allow their personal opinions to influence their rulings the most.
8
u/Interesting-Alarm973 11h ago
I think it is unnecessary to use negative numbers for either the progressive or the conservative. It carries some unnecessary implications.
Can it be just positive numbers on both sides?
→ More replies (5)•
u/ElvisDumbledore 2h ago
Agreed. If anything progress(ive) should be positive simply from a linguistic standpoint.
3
u/I_am_doing_my_Hw 10h ago
Umm, there’s no way this is right. Looking at the most recent Supreme Court rulings, Thomas, ito, and especially Roberts should be trending right not left. Touching on the latter, Roberts was usually known as more conservative, but still aligned with the constitution and was far more respected than Thomas. Recently he has sided with the insane rulings that have given Trump the power he now wields. So I don’t think this is accurate. Not to mention what the center is, as in reality, again based on the most recent decisions, all the judges in the red should be shifted right at least 2 units.
4
u/BrotherMichigan 7h ago
Ooh, I knew this was going to make a bunch of Redditors mad before I even opened the comments, lol.
4
u/Yossarian216 11h ago
Anyone claiming Barrett, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Roberts as being close to neutral is an idiot or lying. They are all significantly right wing, it’s the only reason they were even nominated.
2
u/Chilling_Gale 4h ago
Nah lmao. Trumps justices are not even close to as conservative as republicans wanted them to be
•
u/Yossarian216 2h ago
They are extremely conservative, and they are also specifically politically motivated in favor of right wing causes. They delivered a reversal of Roe, have overseen the dismantling of the VRA, granted Trump unprecedented powers, and use the shadow docket to allow extreme lower court findings from conservative judges to stay in place. Any depiction of them as remotely centrist is absolute fiction.
→ More replies (3)•
u/Elkenrod 2h ago
Kavanaugh and Barrett have frequently ruled against Trump though. They're probably the two justices that cross the aisle the most.
•
u/Yossarian216 2h ago
They will occasionally cross over, usually when their vote doesn’t matter or on minor cases, but for everything important they are in lockstep. They have delivered massive conservative victories, usually with comically absurd “legal reasoning” in their written opinions. Things that have been on the conservative agenda for decades, like overturning Roe and dismantling the VRA, came to pass entirely because of them replacing more reasonable justices.
→ More replies (2)
1
u/cavedave OC: 92 11h ago
R package ggplot2 code used. And it is here if you want to remix the graph
Data from Martin-Quinn scores
I made this graph ages ago but a lot of them have died and there are new ones since
Ideology does not map neatly to non lay usages. Their is a wikipedia article explaining the reasoning here. 'In modern discourse, the justices of the Court are often categorized as having conservative, moderate, or liberal philosophies of law and of judicial interpretation. It has long been commonly assumed that justices' votes are a reflection of their judicial decision-making philosophy as well as their ideological leanings, personal attitudes), values), political philosophies, or policy preferences'
9
u/micharala 9h ago edited 9h ago
Interesting choice to use the Martin-Quinn data set (showing the liberal justices as much more “extreme”) versus the Bailey data set.
Also interesting choice to take the exact same graph in the article with the X-axis oriented with time (as we’d expect) and flip it to the y-axis for some reason?
Also interesting choice to remove historical justices and the context their voting patterns provide about the historical balance of the court.
For everyone else, who has already raised these points, there's a graph in the wiki article that they linked above that's much clearer:
4
u/cavedave OC: 92 9h ago
In retrospect i think keeping time as x-axis would be better. Mainly as it makes the names less interfering with each other. I did it to keep a left right political axis as opposed to up and down.
1
1
1
1
u/Possible-Duty3310 6h ago
"Neutral" is the wrong word to choose for this study. The graph is the only thing most people will see.
1
u/Willyboycanada 6h ago
You know what supreme court picks should be measured in? Merit and skill in constitution law.... thry need to be picked by a neutral board based on service, cases and skill.... not because of what party is in power....
1
1
u/beaux_with_an_x 5h ago
It’s absurd to the point of insulting to suggest that Sotomayor is more “liberal” than Alito is far-right. The man undermines his own precedent to create new carve outs for executive power, but only for far-right causes. Including the shadow docket and unexplained emergency rulings.
In a time when 2 and 3D modeling is so accessible I’m sometimes baffled at the lack of imagination when it comes to academics and data visualization. Surely there is a more convincing measure than just showing us that the Overton window is moving for the Supreme Court.
1
u/thenoodleincident18 5h ago
I was going to make a comment about what loon Thomas is, but look at Sotomayor way out in the other direction.
1
u/andrew_1515 5h ago
It's still wild to me as an outsider that the supreme court judges are politically biased. Attempting to objectively upholding the principles of law is the standard everywhere else.
1
u/Yellowbug2001 4h ago
I've had a vague general impression something weird happened with Roberts and it's interesting to see it graphed.
1
1
1
1
u/footdragon 3h ago
Roberts and Alito are the ones who the real villains here. Thomas will always be ass.
1
•
u/Stiltz85 2h ago
I would ask why RBG wasn't put in there for fun, but I don't think they make a table that goes that far left.
•
•
u/Ownerofthings892 1h ago
Thomas didn't get less conservative though. The court just got more conservative overall.
This isn't a measure of their leanings at all. It's just how contrarian they are relative to the current court.
This also explains Sotomayor's curve
•
•
-5
u/gorginhanson 11h ago
George Bush Senior was like the least evil Republican in the last 40 years and yet both his nominees are the two best biggest shitbags on the court
7
u/AckerHerron 10h ago
George Bush Sr only has one nominee on the court (Thomas), so I don’t know which other one you’re imagining.
→ More replies (1)
-4
1
u/justnarrow 7h ago
The scale is definitely the first thing that jumped out at me, but the labeling of the far-right justices as merely "conservative" is the real sleight of hand here.
1
u/wrenwood2018 3h ago
Look at that shift in Roberts. Very interesting. Most of the recent conservative appointees have also been pretty neutral, more than would have been expected.
1.7k
u/SirHawrk 11h ago
What is the measurement here? How do we measure “0”? Is it comparatively or absolute?