The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions highlight the unity between the liberals on the bench and the fracturing of the conservative side, according to NPR.
According to NPR’s analysis, “the four hard-line conservatives,” Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, “wrote way more separate opinions,” including “nearly two-thirds of the concurring opinions… in which individual justices do not agree with some or all of the reasoning in the majority opinion.”
The liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, “banded together in most cases,” according to NPR, which notes that “of the 60 votes cast this term, the liberals voted as a unified group 80% of the time. The four most conservative justices voted together in 70% of cases.”
NPR also notes that of the 45 opinions written by a single member of the court, 31 were authored by one of the four most conservative justices, with Thomas writing the most. The conservative justices also “wrote more pages than the liberal justices, writing 734 pages of concurring and dissenting opinions, out of 1,214 such pages total.”
Chief Justice John Roberts, who NPR describes as “the most restrained conservative author,” only wrote one concurring opinion and one dissenting opinion, but he often casts the deciding vote in cases and usually writes the majority opinion.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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