How "conservative" are the Republican Supreme Court justices?

The answer: not very.

This is a politics post. Because politics is downstream of culture and culture is downstream of society’s beliefs, this post feels like a bit of a regression. However, it is useful to review certain common misconceptions about the makeup of the Supreme Court, its ability and willingness to check the power of the legislative and executive branches, and how it may address lawfare manifested in the upcoming Trump trials and 2024 election issues (such as efforts to remove Trump from multiple state ballots).

A number of months ago I analyzed the composition of the U.S. Senate, concluding that, even though the Senate was roughly evenly split, there were really only seven Republican Senators that consistently voted in a pro-American manner, or maybe fifteen if one was being generous. In other words, representation for right-wing populists was dismal, 15% of the Senate at most, and therefore they served merely as fig leaves, cover for the myth of popular representation as globohomo-backed politicians of the uni-party establishment dictate actual policy.

This leads to questions about populism’s support in other governmental institutions. How supportive of America First populism or dissident policies is the Supreme Court, especially by its Republican Supreme Court justices?

The Supreme Court is generally perceived as being one of the last bastions of Republican control in the United States. Pro-globohomo, viciously anti-white liberals control the university system, the schooling system, the media, the entertainment complex, the Senate, effectively the House and the governorships (both are roughly tied with slight Republican majorities, but many “Republicans” are RINOs while the Democrats vote monolithically), the top brass of the military, the neutered police forces, the CIA, DOJ, FBI, NSA, EPA, IRS, Homeland Security, etc. Republicans do control a solid majority of State legislatures and the rank-and-file of the military and police do lean heavily Republican, but that’s it.

The Supreme Court is presently 6-3, with six appointed Republican Supreme Court justices: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Cohen Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, and three appointed Democrat justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The Court in 2023

How much of a check does this Court have on legislature and executive overreach? What do the “Republican” and “Democrat” labels mean in practice? And how do we make that determination?

As background, there are about 60 cases that the Supreme Court decides in any given year. You can see the specific case breakdown hyperlinked for 2022-2023, 2021-2022, 2020-2021, 2019-2020, 2018-2019, and 2017-2018. Many of these cases deal with complex procedural technicalities, many with criminal law, many with administrative law and various other apolitical topics. Very few cases are high-profile and political.

Chief Justice John Roberts is very sensitive to public opinion and the court’s perceived legitimacy. He does not want to be seen as crafting law from the bench, as the court faces court-packing threats like the court faced in 1937 with the “switch in time saved nine”. As such, Roberts really doesn’t like to take on high profile cases — to take on a version 2 of Bush v. Gore would probably give him a heart attack, and the Court rejected all 2020 election challenges (although Thomas and Alito hinted at their willingness to consider them) — and Roberts generally does all he can to reach consensus with as many justices as possible, even if that means narrowing the scope of the ruling to be so attenuated as to be near meaningless, if the Court agrees to hear the case at all.

As Obama said when he decided not to pursue a career track toward becoming a Supreme Court justice, “If you’re going to make change, you’re not going to do it as a Supreme Court clerk.” The cases before the court take years to get there in a winding, circuitous process; the Court was and is too slow, too cumbersome, far too reactive to be able to proactively remake society the way Obama wanted. The court is essentially a stopgap measure to radical change, but easily swayed by media and political pressures.

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Methodology

How should one analyze the 360 or so cases from 2017 until the present? For purposes of this post the cleanest approach is as follows: compare the voting records of the Republican justices to the record of the most conservative member of the court, the wonderful Clarance Thomas.¹ Thomas is constantly smeared in the media with one-sided, biased media allegations about financial impropriety², and he was barely confirmed to the seat because of the politicized allegations of Anita Hill. He received and continues to receive rougher treatment from globohomo - despite being a proud black man - than any of the white justices, including crybaby Brett Kavanaugh who had similar tactics used against him, simply because Thomas is at least dissident-adjacent and dissidents receive no preference at all in society, no matter their race, gender or sexual orientation. People only receive preferment and protection within their checkmark box victim category if they are liberal or pro-globohomo.

To compare Republican justice voting records to Thomas’s, we will narrow the scope further with the following parameters:

1. We will limit the analysis of the voting record to a period designated from Trump’s 2017 inauguration when everything became much more politicized and hysterical until today;

2. We will limit the analysis to cases where Thomas dissented from the majority opinion, because if Thomas is in the majority then it either involves liberals joining the decision (which they wouldn’t do in a politicized case) or from a unanimous or near-unanimous Republican vote, which isn’t helpful to parse differing beliefs of the justices (although I must give them credit for rejecting the OSHA COVID-19 mandate for private sector employees with 100+ employees, to which the liberal justices dissented); and

3. We will limit the analysis of cases to those that are politicized, which generally means cases involving voter access, redistricting, state rights, Trump cases, immigration cases, gun rights cases and gay/transgender rights cases.

By parsing the cases in this manner, we are able to decrease the applicable cases from 360+ down to a mere 8, which are reviewed below.

Note: this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive analysis, merely a useful heuristic, as the analysis does not look into important politicized cases that the Court simply declined to take up for consideration.

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The cases

The following are the eight cases that Thomas dissented from, the topics of those cases, and whether the other Republican justices joined Thomas in dissent (in green) or joined the majority (in red):

Allen v. Milligan: This was a case regarding whether Alabama’s congressional redistricting discriminated against black voters. The Court decided 5-4 to maintain an injunction that required Alabama to create an additional majority-minority district. Roberts and Kavanaugh joined the Democrat justices. This case alone will likely net the Democrats multiple House seats (4-5+?) in 2024.

Moore v. Harper: The Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that the Elections Clause does not give state legislatures sole power over elections, rejecting independent state legislature theory. The case arose from the redistricting of North Carolina's districts by its legislature after the 2020 United States census, which the state courts found to be too artificial and partisan, and an extreme case of gerrymandering in favor of the Republican Party. This is important given Republicans control state legislatures by a wide margin, 28-19-3 in 2023, so this case dramatically curtailed their authority. Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett sided with the Democrat justices.

Biden v. Texas: The Court reversed the Fifth Circuit by a 5–4 vote and held that the federal government has the authority to revoke the Migrant Protection Protocols, the revocation of which ended Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy. This has and will continue to have a major impact on encouraging massive levels of illegal immigration. Roberts and Kavanaugh sided with the liberals.

New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. City of New York: This was a case addressing whether the gun ownership laws of New York City, which restrict the transport of a licensed firearm out of one's home, violated the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. After the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, New York City and New York state cynically amended its laws to allay the challenged provision. In a per curiam decision in April 2020, the Supreme Court determined that the case was moot, vacating and remanding the case to lower courts. Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch wanted to hear the case; eventually the case was re-heard in 2022 and had a proper 6-3 decision in favor of gun rights. Why such tentative, slow support for gun rights in the first place?

Bostock v. Clayton County: The Court held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against discrimination if they are gay or transgender. Gorsuch and Roberts joined the liberal justices in this decision.

Trump v. Vance: This case arose from a subpoena issued in August 2019 by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. against Mazars, then-President Donald Trump's accounting firm, for Trump's tax records and related documents, as part of his ongoing investigation into the Stormy Daniels scandal. Trump commenced legal proceedings to prevent their release. The Court agreed that Trump was obligated to provided the records and documents; only Alito and Thomas dissented.

Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP: This case involved subpoenas issued by committees of the US House of Representatives to obtain the tax returns of President Donald Trump. The Court agreed that Trump was obligated to provide his tax returns; only Alito and Thomas dissented.

Sessions v. Dimaya: In this case the Court held that 18 U.S.C. § 16(b)[1] a statute defining certain "aggravated felonies" for immigration purposes, is unconstitutionally vague. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) classifies some categories of crimes as "aggravated felonies", and immigrants convicted of those crimes, including those legally present in the United States, are almost certain to be deported. Those categories include "crimes of violence", which are defined by the "elements clause" and the "residual clause". The Court struck down the "residual clause", which classified every felony that, "by its nature, involves a substantial risk" of "physical force against the person or property" as an aggravated felony. Essentially, the Court held that illegal aliens committing certain felonies would not result in almost certain deportation. Gorsuch agreed with the liberal justices.

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Analysis

There is a very limited sample of politicized cases, which are but a very small percentage of the cases that the Court has heard over the past six years. From this sample, though, we can see a kind of trend emerge: Alito is almost as conservative as Thomas is, agreeing with him on all of these controversial decisions; Roberts and Kavanaugh almost always disagree with Thomas and Alito on these decisions, and Barrett and Gorsuch are wishy-washy.

Much more importantly than these cases though is that, as stated above, the Supreme Court wouldn’t consider 2020 election cases except as briefly hinted at otherwise by Thomas and Alito in their dissent to Texas v. Pennsylvania.

We can therefore say with a reasonable measure of confidence that the Supreme Court will not step in to resolve contentious 2024 election cases (at least if it involves challenging globohomo’s dictates) and it is questionable to what extent, if any, they will be willing to uphold challenges to Trump or his allies’ legal cases, regardless of their merits.

This isn’t to say that a Republican dominated Supreme Court has no value; they likely slow down to an extent the egalitarian ratchet effect which, if the Court were majority Democrat (and possibly had insane, deranged bloodthirsty Merrick Garland on it), we would still be under oppressive OSHA COVID vaccine mandates and who knows what other sort of additional horrendous anti-white, anti-civilizational dictates. A world of decisions led by anti-white dim racists Sotomayor, Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson is a world of even more rapid civilizational collapse and destruction. I guess the right-wing under this setup also gets occasional fig leaf “victories” such as:

1. Theoretically getting rid of college affirmative action (which won’t happen in practice, admission committees will simply find new ways to discriminate),

2. Theoretically allowing individual discrimination against same-sex-marriage (which in practice means forever continued lawfare harassment against those businesses) and

3. Overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs — congrats, evangelicals — even though the practical effects of that decision are (1) to prevent abortions by only poor, low-time-horizon lumpenproleteriat, as those with more resources and better planning will just go to the next state over for their abortions; (2) to dramatically curtail Republican wins in the 2022 Senate and House elections; and (3) to result in energized Democrat and independent votes in the 2024 elections.

These three so-called victories are at best Pyrrhic victories, meaningless to the big picture as the country rapidly careens toward implementing what happened in California but on a national level: a permanent one party state based on wide-open borders and tens of millions of new non-integrating immigrants, with the Supreme Court utterly powerless to do anything about it…

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Why does this matter?

There are four reasons:

1. This post continues my general theme of encouraging people to put less faith in the political process or the system as a whole, to set realistic expectations for oneself. I increasingly believe this world is controlled by the Demiurge, and that we are put here as kind of a prison (if there's any purpose at all). Schopenhauer comments on this point: “As a reliable compass for orienting yourself in life nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this you will order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments, and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished for his existence and each in his own particular way”;

2. As i have written elsewhere (see Takeaway #1), the best way to judge a system for modeling the world is by its predictive accuracy. The black-pilled take has been much more accurate than any other take I've seen so far. This post highlights this perspective by arguing that the Supreme Court is highly unlikely to support Trump during 2024's upcoming election theft;

3. This post is one piece of a multi-post assemblage that will be used in the future to argue that the odds of a “redneck rebellion” succeeding are exceedingly unlikely; and

4. My broader perspective of philosophical pessimism is deepening and entrenching, perhaps not in a healthy way. This will be discussed more in a future post.

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Conclusion

As unsatisfactory as the current ideological composition of the Court is - to the point there should be no significant hope or expectation that the Court will stop any of globohomo’s devious plans - it could be much worse. Globohomo likely murdered Thomas-tier conservative Antonin Scalia in 2016 (he was found with a pillow over his head in a hotel room as a public statement) and it wouldn’t be surprising for them to do the same to Thomas. Thomas is 75 years old, though, and rumored to not be in such fantastic health, while Alito is 73 years old, which should be worrying for conservatives in the medium-term even without conspiracy concerns. If liberals appoint a couple of justices and swing the majority their way, one can expect the speed of globohomo stripping you of your vestigial rights to intensify significantly.

1. Thomas’s conservatism approaches dissident thought (defined previously here) in many ways, although he is an originalist which is, like standard conservatism, always losing.

2. These media-created allegations have no downside for globohomo. They could potentially get Thomas to resign and/or recuse himself from criminal 2020 election cases; they want to apply pressure on conservative justices to cave on important cases; and they want to set the foundation for packing the court or impeaching the justices if Democrats receive a large enough congressional majority. There is also a rumor that Ginni Thomas is a listed co-conspirator in one of the Trump cases, which would be a brilliant (and incredibly evil and devious) move by globohomo to force Thomas’s recusal from these cases. If I were a globohomo strategist this is exactly the type of move I would devise.