The New York Times has a nice graphic When Politics Approach the Bench "The clean ideological split of the most recent three terms is unprecedented. Here are justices from the past 60 terms arrayed in order of their voting records from liberal to conservative."
I guess I see the point but once you just accept that Stephens and Souter were liberals, even though they were Republican appointees, the court division has been pretty consistent for a while. What I didn't realize before this chart was how much the court has swung based on party. In 1953 eight of nine justices were Democratic appointments (probably all by FDR). By 1972 it was down to just three Democrats and in 1975 just two. It stayed that way until 1991 when Thomas replaced Marshall and Byron White was the only Democrat. In 1993 Gingsberg replaced White but was still the only Democrat though the next year she was joined by Breyer. They remained the only two Democratic appointments on the court until 2009.
Viewed from Republicans, in 1972 they had six of nine seats, and from 1975-2008 they had 7 or 8 seats. Now Stevens and Souter were certainly not conservatives, but since Obama, they've lost two more seats.
The graphic accompanies this article, The Polarized Court.
1 comment:
Having the order from liberal to conservative is useful and the correlation or lack thereof vs. which party appointed them is interesting. I would like to see how they compare across years. have the access not just reset each term from least to most but have an independent measure of the liberalness/conservativeness of each justice and plot those over the years. I recall you posting things like that over the years.
Post a Comment