Three conservative Supreme Court Justices have sided with their liberal colleagues on several recent high-profile cases, suggesting that “the days of a single ‘swing’ justice may be over,” according to FiveThirtyEight.
When former Justice Anthony Kennedy, viewed as a moderate conservative who cast the deciding vote on decisions concerning abortion and gay marriage, retired “one big question was whether another justice would continue his legacy as the court’s ‘swing’ vote,” writes FiveThirtyEight’s Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux.
Based on data compiled by University of Michigan scholars from the Supreme Court Database shows that President Donald Trump’s appointees have turned out to be closer to Chief Justice John Roberts, one of the most moderate justices, than the more-conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.
Justice Neil Gorsuch most often agreed with the most conservative justice, Clarence Thomas, and agreed with Justice Brett Kavanaugh as often as he sided with the liberal Elena Kagan. Kavanaugh was actually slightly closer to the center than Roberts, though both were on the conservative side.
“Roberts and Kavanaugh are more ideologically moderate than Gorsuch, but Gorsuch was more of a loose cannon,” Thomson-DeVeaux notes. “He joined the liberals in more closely divided cases than any of his conservative colleagues. That made him the ‘swingiest’ conservative on the court, even though it was Roberts who ultimately determined the outcome of one of the most closely watched cases of the term,” which concerned a citizenship question on the 2020 census.
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