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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

It is widely thought that SCOTUS decides based on ideology and politics, and only justifies it with the text of the Constitution after the fact. Although they like to present it as some kind of rigorous reasoning, there are always sufficient vaguenesses and internal contradictions to justify any interpretation they prefer.

Supreme Court members (the formal title "Justice" seems laughable) have increasingly been chosen for their compliance with the ideology of the party in power. Since that coincides with the party who wrote this law, I think they'll have no trouble upholding it if they wish.

I have no idea what grounds they'll use for that, but I don't believe it's relevant. Only the actual decision matters.

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> It is widely thought that SCOTUS decides based on ideology and politics

Citation needed. Judges have differing judicial philosophies and those philosophies may run contrary to a political parties aims but it does not mean they are servants of political parties.

It is likely that the people who think their decisions are purely politically biased are the ones whose politics are not aligned with whatever the court decided. Rarely do they dig into the justifications and expert analysis for a given decision.

Both liberal and conservative leaning justices have ruled against things that the parties which helped appoint them wanted.

Get real. A bunch of those mofos are on a payroll.

I don't believe they're on a payroll. They don't need to be. They were carefully courted as true believers in their ideological cause. They believe in the votes they cast.

And that's actually much more reliable than paying them. People who can be bought can be out-bid. True believers will do it for nothing except the right to make their ideology the law of the land.

Ok, I admit that you are right. Getting paid for their "opinions" is the proverbial icing I suppose.

They don't vote with their ideology with 100% reliability, but they do so far more often than not. They don't need to dig into the justifications to know that there are (frequently) four Supreme Court members who disagree with it. Those court members produce equally reasoned, scholarly arguments -- and are nearly always precisely the people nominated by the other party.

Differing judicial philosophies will end up with different decisions.

Not reading there justifications for why they made a decision just because the judge does not align with ones political view is ignorance, plain and simple.

Only reading the critical analysis of any viewpoint or decision without reviewing their legal justifications will lead to massive derangement in ones perspective.

Law and high level court decisions will have some form of logic to them which is worth examining before dismissing them as partisan.

> It is widely thought that SCOTUS decides based on ideology and politics, and only justifies it with the text of the Constitution after the fact.

In addition to this being widely thought, do you happen to have any evidence that indicates whether or not it is true? My initial inclination is to suspect that it is not.

My personal experience with arguments deriding the constitutional coherence of SCOTUS jurisprudence usually involves people who are bringing their own political/ideological bias into their evaluation of court rulings -- often without even reading the rulings themselves -- and/or applying their own idiosyncratic interpretations of the constitution. See, for example, discussions surrounding the Citizens United ruling, where almost all of the controversy involves incorrect assumptions of both what was at issue in the case and what the ruling concluded.

While there have been breaks with stare decisis in some important cases over the years, by and large, these seem to be exceptions rather than the rule. The idea of the court abandoning the increasingly expansive interpretation of the commerce clause that's been at the basis of a huge amount of federal law for the past century, just to enable Texas to regulate the internet for the entire globe, seems incredibly far-fetched.

My evidence is that the vast majority of Supreme Court decisions are either unanimous (when they don't represent an ideological issue) or along party lines (when they do).

If they were really "applying their own idiosyncratic interpretations of the constitution", we would see a wider variety of votes. Instead, we see the same lines come up over and over. Even if you don't read the counter-arguments, you know where to find them -- in the dissents from the Court members nominated by the opposite party.

I do not doubt that the vast majority of Citizens United discussions are of no merit -- that applies to practically every discussion. But you can find a scholarly disagreement in the decision of four Supreme Court members -- all of whom were nominated by the opposite political party.

Even if this case fails to "enable Texas to regulate the internet for the entire globe", I suspect that it will only do so via a 5-4 ruling with only 1 or 2 members failing to align ideologically. They are not absolutely unified in their partisan leanings. But when partisanship is the issue, they will vote along their partisan lines much more often than not.

So it does not strike me as at all unlikely that they will choose to allow Texas' law. I am not certain of it, but I believe that "incredibly far-fetched" is not a correct characterization.

> My evidence is that the vast majority of Supreme Court decisions are either unanimous (when they don't represent an ideological issue) or along party lines (when they do).

I don't think that's a valid argument -- there are obviously differences in judicial philosophy that incline judges toward better apparent with one political faction or another, and non-unanimous rulings usually reflect different judicial philosophies.

> If they were really "applying their own idiosyncratic interpretations of the constitution", we would see a wider variety of votes.

No, you misunderstood. I was accusing those arguing that jurisprudence is politically motivated of looking at things through the lens of their own idiosyncratic interpretations of the constitution. We don't want the justices on the court doing this.

> I do not doubt that the vast majority of Citizens United discussions are of no merit -- that applies to practically every discussion. But you can find a scholarly disagreement in the decision of four Supreme Court members -- all of whom were nominated by the opposite political party.

No, I'm not claiming that discussions themselves have no merit, but rather that critiques of the ruling in public discourse are often based on factually incorrect assumptions about what the ruling involved.

The fact of the matter is the constitution is a vague enough document to justify anything you want with enough legal hand wringing. Roe v. Wade was based on a privacy protection. For decades the Supreme Court's opinion was that the 2nd amendment only justified very limited gun rights. The constitution has been claimed to both support, and limit literal slave rights.

There are even openly different ways that people approach "interpreting" the constitution.

Anyone who works with documents that "define" a contract or API should understand just how vague and useless the constitution is as a literal reference document. That's why the same words have been used to "justify" countless contrary opinions over just 250 years

>It is widely thought that SCOTUS decides based on ideology and politics, and only justifies it with the text of the Constitution after the fact

I don't think that is the case and in fact I think you are getting it a bit backwards.

The justices have an ideology which forms their view on how to interpret the Constitution and there are some serious questions to be had on the Constitution. Enumerated vs implied powers, incorporation of the bill of rights, etc. Their ideology forms their views on these issues. Once they formed their view on these issues they believe that is the real meaning of the Constitution.

Their interpretation of the Constitution is then used to justify their rulings. It may look like they are doing the opposite, but that is because you don't understand their interpretation of the Constitution. They do tend to be decently consistent when you understand their positions on the Constitution.

It's difficult to separate out whether their abstract Constitutional ideology exists prior to their political leanings, or vice versa, because the two are so closely correlated. There are no "originalist" left-wing justices, and it's impossible to tell whether one becomes an originalist because the same thinking also causes them to have right-wing views, or vice versa, or if there is some other underlying cause.

It is clear that they are chosen for their positions based on the expected outcomes. Regardless of what's going on behind the closed doors, the outcomes seem entirely pre-determined based on the political affiliation of the President who nominated them and the Senate who confirmed them.

I personally don't think that the legal reasoning is as consistent as you believe it is, but I think that's a matter of opinion. I also don't think it matters, since the outcomes are the only thing that matters and are so highly correlated with partisanship -- as they were designed to be. The effect on the individual is the same.

Presumably we'll find out in this instance. The OP was claiming that the Court would certainly vote not to uphold a state law from their political allies. I've explained why I disagree. Next June we'll find out.

> It is widely thought that SCOTUS decides based on ideology and politics, and only justifies it with the text of the Constitution after the fact. Although they like to present it as some kind of rigorous reasoning, there are always sufficient vaguenesses and internal contradictions to justify any interpretation they prefer.

I'd say that this is true for the three liberal justices and the four most conservative justices. Roberts has demonstrated otherwise, and Kavanaugh to a lesser degree has joined him in disagreeing with the other conservatives on some cases

I think your view of the court is grounded in a sort of cynicism that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If we convince enough people to see the court as a political institution it will normalize packing the court, which will permanently turn it into a political institution

the merit of the court lies in its ability to operate independently of partisan influence. While this doesn't happen often, normalizing the court as a political institution will prevent it from happening entirely

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