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He has the finest penthouse I've ever seen in town
(I’m told I’ve been slacking on the true purpose of the intertubes.)
Today I learned that the non-partisan (not my assessment) Supreme Court is more conservative than a supermajority of Americans, and that self-identified Democrats more than any other group underestimate how right-wing the court has become.
Journalist’s Resource is a project of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, which describes the online publication as trying to increase the degree to which reporters use peer-reviewed research and evidence-based science in their stories.
The site is overflowing with references to and explanations of research on almost any subject one can think of, and was both a source of information for my own writing and a good recreational read before my brain broke the last time. Today’s visit seemed warranted now that the instrument is more or less in working order again, and I was rewarded with this report on the study returning those results about the court.
The study includes surveys from 2010, 2020 and 2021, the most recent after Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ginsburg, to test the ideological location and movement represented by a range of court decisions. One of their findings is that Brett “Don’t Hold My Beer” Kavanaugh is now the ‘centrist’ on the court, taking over from the solidly reactionary John Roberts after Barrett’s ascension.
[The researchers] say they were surprised they did not detect the rightward shift in the court’s collective ideology before 2021, considering just three years earlier conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh succeeded retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy, who, according to the Washington Post, “generally was conservative but sided with liberals in some of the court’s most important cases.”
Before Barrett’s confirmation in 2020, Justice John Roberts was the court’s median member, representing the ideological middle ground between the most conservative and liberal justices, the researchers write in “A Decade-Long Longitudinal Survey Shows That the Supreme Court Is Now Much More Conservative Than the Public.”
In late 2020, the median moved from Roberts to Kavanaugh, signaling the court’s more conservative direction, the analysis shows.
Roberts, you may recall, hates voting rights and affirmative action, among other popular measures, and he’s now to the left of the conservative majority. The most recent survey preceded the decisions from the court term which just ended; while the researchers say they anticipated the outcome of the cases on abortion and gun rights lunacy, they don’t yet have survey data to measure the court’s current position on the scale.
The study was completed a year ago but not published until June of this year, just a week or two before the court formally shredded abortion rights; the Journalist’s Resource story on the survey was published a week afterward. A Google News search turned up four references to the survey: three of them were from the journal in which the study was published, and the fourth was from the Stanford graduate school of business.
(Featured prominently today on the front page of that journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a study entitled “Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios,“ if you’re feeling calamity-deprived.)
A broader search returned 34 results, none of which were media references other than Journalist’s Resource. So, unfortunately, as of now none of the mass reportage organizations are mentioning it in their supreme court coverage.
Early days, though.
I don’t know when, if ever, the court could last have been reasonably described as non-partisan. And I don’t know how Democrats could have underestimated the conservative bent of it, although that may have changed after this past term’s decisions.
Consider this piece a hearty endorsement of Journalist’s Resource. It’s good for browsing, you can probably find something on most topics in which you’re interested, and you can see how coverage of topics has evolved over time. Good stuff!
(Contributors to this post include Mdou Moctar’s Afrique Victime and Ghost Funk Orchestra’s An Ode To Escapism. Your music recommendations are welcome.)
Hmmm. Might have to reread at an earlier time.
Damn Gmail put this in in the promotions folder, again (yes, I asked it nicely not to). No wonder I wasn't seeing your emails. And this was after I did a search and actually opened a bunch of them. You would think that would be enough, but NO.