Supreme Court divisions rage as public disputes intensify

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts with Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor on March 7, 2024. SHAWN THEW/Pool via REUTERS

When Donald Trump's first term ended on January 20, 2021, he left the U.S. Supreme Court with a 6-3 GOP supermajority — which remained during Joe Biden's presidency, as Biden's lone High Court appointee, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, replaced a Bill Clinton appointee (retired Justice Stephen Breyer). The Court's three Democratic appointees (Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) have often butted heads with the supermajority, and according to the Daily Beast's Janna Brancolini, those conflicts aren't growing any less intense.

"The Supreme Court's political divide is at its widest point in decades, with the rate of ideologically split cases more than doubling this term compared to the average rate since 2005," Brancolini explains in the Beast. "The Court, last month, ended a politically fraught term marked by surprisingly public — and at times personal — disputes between the liberal and conservative justices."

President Donald Trump was furious when GOP-appointed justices sided with the liberal justices on key rulings pertaining to tariffs and birthright citizenship. But in other decisions, the six GOP appointees — Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Trump appointees Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch — and three Democratic appointees were in lockstep.

"Just days before the term concluded on June 30," Brancolini observes, "liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor signaled her staunch disapproval of one of the conservative majority's decisions by reading her dissent from the bench, prompting an outburst from her ultra-conservative colleague Justice Samuel Alito that shocked veteran court watchers. The justices' increasingly tense interactions come as more cases have been decided along ideological lines, according to data compiled by SCOTUSblog. During the 2025-26 term, the six conservative justices voted together as an ideological coalition against the three liberal justices in 22.7 percent of cases, according to SCOTUSblog."

Brancolini adds, "That's compared with just 10 percent of cases decided along ideological lines between 2005 and 2024."

The six conservative justices, Brancolini notes, have been "backing" Trump "in more than 80 percent of cases" — adding that a YouGov poll released on July 7 shows how unpopular the High Court has become.

"A YouGov poll released this month found that Americans largely disapproved of the Court's increasingly politicized decision-making, with many respondents saying the Court's decisions this term have given Trump too much power. Overall, 50 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the way the Supreme Court is handling its job, compared with just 36 percent who approved. Nearly half — or 45 percent — said recent decisions had given the president too much power, compared with 29 percent who said the president had been given the right amount of power and 9 percent who said he'd been given too little power."

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