In 2000, most legal pundits said that Bush v. Gore would never make it the Supreme Court, because voting was a states' right issue. Boy, were they wrong.
In fact, many legal analysts and scholars prognosticate about Supreme Court behavior as if it were of a single mind looking at the Constitution and the law in a serious, scholarly way.
But that perspective of considering the law conscientiously in terms of precedent and the nation's founding legal document forgets one thing: four of the Supreme Court justices are total partisan hacks. Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts are activist right wing judges who decide many major cases for political reasons first - and then find twisted legal justifications for their decisions. Kennedy usually joins with them in major 5-4 decisions that have political impact.
Scalia appears to be the major enforcer of political allegiance to the Federalist Society and the Koch brothers. The man is so dangerously ideological that he even declared, in a dissenting opinion, that there is nothing in the Constitution to prevent an innocent person from being executed. He argued that, "this Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is actually innocent."
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