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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

A better article: https://archive.ph/Cyixf#selection-595.0-595.247

"The vote in the employer mandate case was 6 to 3, with liberal justices in dissent. The vote in the health care case was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joining the liberal justices to form a majority. ... the court’s conservative majority seemed doubtful that the administration had congressional authorization to impose the requirements."

Does anyone have a guess as to how a vote by Congress to authorize OSHA vaccine mandates would fair? Would it be one of the purely partisan issues, like Build Back Better and the voting legislation? I suppose that the fact that it hasn't already passed is evidence that it wouldn't.

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>Does anyone have a guess as to how a vote by Congress to authorize OSHA vaccine mandates would fair?

If I understand correctly, S.J. Res 29 [1] is a senate resolution that answers this exact question. Looking at the voting result [2], 2 Democrats voted YAY (ie expressing disapproval of the mandate) along with some Independents and all Republicans. This leads me to believe that a similar rule would not pass the Senate. Although there could be more to the story, eg I don't know the motivation that the two Democrats had when voting YAY, especially given at least to my understanding this kind of vote is more symbolic than anything.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-joint-re... [2] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...

Not necessarily purely symbolic. It could have been done as a signal to the court that the mandate would not have had congressional approval.

Ah, surprised that I didn't think of it that way, considering the way that I learned about this Senate resolution was by reading the majority decision: "In fact, the most noteworthy action concerning the vaccine mandate by either House of Congress has been a majority vote of the Senate disapproving the regulation on December 8, 2021. S. J. Res. 29, 117th Cong., 1st Sess. (2021)." [1]

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21a244_hgci.pdf

They've certainly passed significant legislation towards covid, yet have not included vaccine mandates in any.

My guess is that by the time anything got through, we'll be past the omicron surge and Americans will be talking inflation and elections.

We might also hear some musing about the conservative supreme court and needing to expand it to change the majority.

Why does so much news coverage insist on dividing the Court into "liberal" and "conservative" justices?

It's almost as if the media thinks there's not enough partisanship in the legislative and executive branches, so they need to inject a red vs. blue narrative to the doings of the Supreme Court.

Doesn't SCOTUS typically decide cases more based on technical legal criteria than partisan ideology?

Justices are specifically chosen for their liberal or conservative ideology and perceived loyalty in hopes of ruling in favor of the party in power's long term agenda. Republicans appoint conservative justices, Democrats appoint liberal judges. Both assume quid pro quo. Ignoring this fact is simply naive.

From a 2018 Washington Post article

>The ratio is staggering. According to the Supreme Court Database, since 2000 a unanimous decision has been more likely than any other result — averaging 36 percent of all decisions. Even when the court did not reach a unanimous judgment, the justices often secured overwhelming majorities, with 7-to-2 or 8-to-1 judgments making up about 15 percent of decisions. The 5-to-4 decisions, by comparison, occurred in 19 percent of cases.

You've fallen prey to media outrage mongering. If you go look at decisions for yourself instead just the ones the media tells you about, you'll find that it is also common for the "conservative" and "liberal" justices to switch sides.

Most cases which come to the supreme court aren't particularly partisan. The purpose of the Supreme Court is to clarify what the law is, and many ambiguities do not fall along a conservative-liberal axis. Someone can be a conservative and still agree with liberals on many things, and vice versa; indeed that's how intelligent people with well developed opinions ought to behave. Even on partisan issues, there is still typically an element of degree - an extreme conservative may see something as reasonable while a moderate conservative may not. That conservative and liberal justices in some cases vote with each other is in absolutely no way evidence that they are not conservative or liberal.

This is true, but it's still much rarer for cases to be genuinely mixed. If you do see a 6-3 decision, it's nearly certain to be along party/ideological lines.

It's remarkable that this was a 5-4 decision against the conservative justices. The vast majority of 5-4 decisions will be a single conservative justice siding with the liberal justices.

When a case is nonpartisan, they will have a lot of unanimity, and a small number of dissents from it. But when the case is partisan -- and a fair number of them are -- they will fall along partisan lines. There just aren't that many cases of serious but non-partisan disagreement.

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