There’s Room for Surprises From Amy Coney Barrett
It’s easy to predict voting patterns of Supreme Court justices, but hard to forecast how they’ll choose sides in specific cases.
They’re confident, anyway.
Photographer: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty ImagesHere is a paradox. It is pretty easy to predict the voting patterns of new Supreme Court justices. But it can be exceedingly difficult to predict the votes of justices in specific cases, which means that it can be difficult as well to predict how those cases are going to be decided.
When President Bill Clinton appointed Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court in 1994, those who knew Breyer’s work knew that his voting patterns would be moderately liberal — more centrist than those of progressive heroes Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, but to the left, for sure, of Justice Antonin Scalia. And when President George W. Bush appointed John Roberts as chief justice in 2005, it was clear, from Roberts’ record, that his voting patterns would be moderately conservative — distinctly more conservative than those of Breyer, but distinctly less so than those of Scalia.