To the Right, to the Right
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has led the Supreme Court in a move to the right that was only occasionally blocked by the swing vote of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
Statistics help tell the story.
The court decided 24 cases by 5-4 votes this term, the Washington Post reports. Kennedy voted with conservatives in 13 cases and with liberals in six.
Slate offers more numbers, culled from SCOTUSblog, to show just how closely Roberts is allied with the other conservative justices. Roberts agreed with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in 92 percent of the court’s divided rulings, with Justice Antonin Scalia in 89 percent and with Justice Clarence Thomas in 85 percent.
“Conservatives got everything they could reasonably have hoped for out of the term,” Washington, D.C., Supreme Court litigator Thomas Goldstein told the Post.
