In a volatile term, a fractured Supreme Court remade America

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump had a very good year at the Supreme Court. On Monday, the court ruled that he is substantially immune from prosecution on charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election. On Friday, the court cast doubt on two of the four charges against him in what remains of that prosecution. And in March, the justices allowed him to seek another term despite a constitutional provision barring insurrectionists from holding office.

Administrative agencies had a horrible term. In three 6-3 rulings along ideological lines, the court’s conservative supermajority erased a foundational precedent that had required courts to defer to agency expertise, dramatically lengthened the time available to challenge agencies’ actions and torpedoed the administrative tribunals in which the Securities and Exchange Commission brings enforcement actions.

The court itself had a volatile term, taking on a stunning array of major disputes and assuming a commanding role in shaping American society and democracy. If the justices felt chastened by the backlash over their 2022 abortion decision, the persistent questions about their ethical standards and the drop in their public approval, there were only glimmers of restraint, notably in ducking two abortion cases in an election year.

The court was divided 6-3 along partisan lines not only in Monday’s decision on Trump’s immunity and the three cases on agency power, but also in a run of major cases on homelessness, voting rights, guns and public corruption.

An unusually high proportion of divided decisions in argued cases — more than two-thirds — were decided by 6-3 votes. But only half of those decisions featured the most common split, with the six Republican appointees in the majority and the three Democratic ones in dissent.

The justices reached unanimous or lopsided rulings in other major cases, including ones letting abortion pills remain widely available, allowing the government to disarm domestic abusers, restoring Trump to the Colorado ballot, endorsing the National Rifle Association’s First Amendment rights and rejecting a challenge to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

A look at how individual justices voted in divided cases issued after oral arguments brings trends at the court into sharp relief, according to data compiled and analyzed by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson of Penn State.

By that measure, the court is extraordinarily polarized. Two of the four most conservative justices to serve since 1937 are on the current court: Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. (The others were Chief Justices William H. Rehnquist and Warren E. Burger.)

In that same time span, two of the five most liberal justices are currently sitting: Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. (The others were Justices Thurgood Marshall, William J. Brennan Jr. and William O. Douglas.)

Overall, in divided cases argued in the last term, Democratic appointees voted for a liberal result 83% of the time and Republican ones 33% of the time — a 50-percentage-point gap.

Chief Justice John Roberts’ leadership of the court was called into question in 2022 by his lonely concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, one in which he failed to persuade any of his five conservative colleagues to join him in restricting but not eliminating the constitutional right to abortion.

Two years later, things are looking up for the chief justice. He assigned himself an unusually large proportion of the term’s majority opinions in the biggest cases, including the ones on Trump’s immunity from prosecution, the Jan. 6 prosecutions, the Second Amendment, the Chevron doctrine and administrative tribunals.

The chief justice was in the majority in divided cases 94% of the time, more than any other member of the court and tying his own record in the term that ended in 2020. No other chief justice since at least 1953 has been in the majority as often.

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