Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, alongside colleagues at the U.S. Capitol (Win McNamee/Pool via REUTERS)
The conservative justices on the Supreme Court have gotten notably defensive in the wake of their growing list of rulings in President Donald Trump's favor, but despite their protests, a legal scholar argued for The Hill that one justice's own words revealed that they are, in fact, "a bunch of partisan hacks," only interested in rulings that "Make Republicans win."
Steven Lubet is a professor emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. On Monday, he published an op-ed for The Hill highlighting past comments from Trump-appointed conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, arguing that, by her "own definition," the court is behaving like unabashed political actors.
"Chief Justice John Roberts unfailingly insists that he and his colleagues are not 'political actors,'" Lubet wrote. "But when the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices recently voted to effectively nullify a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, they indeed revealed themselves as guarantors of the Republican Party’s national agenda. Don’t take my word for it. No less an authority than Justice Amy Coney Barrett has described how to determine whether the justices are neutral arbiters of the law or political operatives in robes. The Republican-appointed super-majority has failed the test".
The comments that Lubet wrote about came in April of 2022, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. She urged the audience to "read the opinion" attached to any given Supreme Court ruling, to discern whether or not it was "designed to impose the policy preferences of the majority," or if it "actually is an honest effort and persuasive effort, even if one you ultimately don’t agree with, to determine what the Constitution and precedent requires."
"Barrett got the test almost right; it should have been 'read the opinions,' plural," Lubet wrote. "Any smart judge can make a single opinion seem coherent and logical. It is only by comparing multiple opinions that a pattern of political favoritism can be seen to emerge. Do the decisions consistently follow what the 'precedent requires,' as Barrett puts it, or do they change course to reach political outcomes?"
Lubet argued that two key rulings from the court on voting rights "contradict one another," in such a way that they "each resulted in Republican electoral advantages." In 2019's Rucho v. Common Cause, the court ruled that overly partisan gerrymandered districts were beyond its authority to alter. More recently, in Louisiana v. Callais, the court decided that it could do that, actually, and "bestowed a seal of approval on 'legitimate' partisan gerrymandering, used as a reason to eliminate a majority-Black congressional district, mapped under the Voting Rights Act."
"So yes, take Barrett’s perceptive advice for identifying partisan hacks," Lubet concluded. "Read the opinions and look for the political gerrymander through-line. Is Callais (written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Roberts) continuous with Rucho (written by Roberts and joined by Alito) on any discernible principle other than partisan advantage?"
