SCOTUS analysis
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f you only get your Supreme Court news from political pundits, you might have gotten the wrong idea about a case decided last year on whether to let Florida ban drag shows. The vote on the high court was 6-3, and you would probably have assumed the court’s six Republican appointees voted on one side and the court’s three liberals on the other.
But that’s not what happened. In the Florida case, three conservative justices — John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — voted with liberal Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson to hold that the law could not be enforced while a related lawsuit was pending.
This 6-3 alignment isn’t new and isn’t rare, as one of us has written before. But our new mathematical analysis of the court’s decisions from the 2022-2023 session shows just how much it makes sense to think of this Supreme Court as a 3-3-3 court — one whose divides are driven not just by ideology, but a range of other legal considerations as well. As the court nears the end of its 2023-2024 term, with a raft of contentious decisions about to land, this will be helpful to keep in mind.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/06/02/supreme-court-justice-math-00152188
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Sarah Isgur, one of the another’s of the piece, has long talked about 3-3-3, evaluating them in two dimensions with the x axis being ideology and the y axis being institutionalism. Roberts is an institutionalist above all, to the occasional disappointment of conservatives.
