Charles LaneDo you think Supreme Court justices are more outwardly partisan today than they were 20 or 25 years ago?
James Homan: No. Historically, we’ve had former elected officials on the Supreme Court. And I think there was some value in that, as opposed to a bunch of college-educated lawyers. They understood the politics, they understood how their decisions worked, and the struggles of implementing them. Maybe that was good for the Court. I also think it’s problematic that the media has for so long continued to make it seem like the Supreme Court is totally above partisanship. The coverage has obviouslyDobbs. But they are individuals and should be treated as such, not as some kind of saints.
lane: I used to cover the Supreme Court. That was almost 20 years ago, and what I learned from my experience covering that court and several lower federal courts was that the higher up in the federal system you go, the more partisan the judges become. And the reason for that is quite simple. First of all, not only are the stakes always the highest on the Supreme Court, but the more issues that are pushed to the court by Congress, the higher the stakes get. When the stakes are high, and your party controls the Senate and the presidency, you absolutely need to be sure that you have people you can trust there.
Homan: Sauter is gone.
lane: Right. So unfortunately, there is probably less incentive than ever for political parties to produce people who are seen as fair-minded and willing to vote against their own party on occasion, even though they really need such people.
Ruth Marcus: I think you’re partially conflating partisanship with ideology. What’s changed over the last 20 to 25 years, maybe a little longer, is that ideological viewpoints have become completely equated with political party, and the courts are now much more clearly divided along ideological lines than they used to be.
Aside from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has accepted a great deal of criticism here, I think that conservative justices, at least in recent times, have been far more inclined to favor partisan audiences than liberal justices, and I think, for example, that they all flocked to the McConnell Center after Mitch McConnell put them on the Supreme Court.
lane: Well, maybe it just seems like conservatives are doing it more now that liberals are gone.
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