If you define the lifelong ideologue who devoted his career to destroying the Voting Rights Act as a hair right of center, then the Supreme Court is a surprisingly centrist institution
Not that we needed more to mock, but the fact that there are *axes with numbers* on that makes the whole thing even more ridiculous.
IANAL, but I know a thing or two about data. And I *really* don't think those things are numerically quantifiable.
They are doing the thing that people do with senate votes where you measure all the votes in relation to each other based on who voted where.
So the part where they assign a left vs right is an exterior imposition on the analysis those votes.
That does seem to be what they did, although they didn’t really say so; if only there were some way to put the ideology of the votes in absolute terns, maybe with a baseline of some sort of “precedent” for the Court’s past voting, just a thought
NO! Don't be silly. The way to measure institutionalism is to find a grouping of votes in relation to each other and retroactively decide that's institutionalist, and definitely don't inestigate what those votes are!
I would argue that for a group of 9 individuals, they are not quantifiable.
They might be quantifiable in the aggregate for a large group, but you've still got the problem of assigning a number to the "left-ness" of the concept of a living wage.
As I mentioned above, it doesn’t really work for the Supreme Court for multiple reasons. The small number of members is one, the small number of votes is another.
You don’t need to assign a number to how “left-wing” something is. The votes themselves are binary.
You have to assign a value to the issue being voted on in order for the vote to have any meaning. Is the assertion that every single issue is 100% liberal or 100% conservative?
It doesn't really make sense given that many of the issues have 60-80% polling one way or another.
Yes, for the purpose of doing this type of analysis every issue is treated as one or the other. Even if a position has 80% support, you’ll still know the coding from where that 20% opposed comes from.
Barrett seems to doing some combination of image rehab for the singularly gross way she grabbed her seat and, like, the gendered labor of managing the boys' tantrums
What’s up with the x axis being shifted to the right? Why is -.5 not the left edge as .5 is the right edge when Alito is closer to the line than Sotomayor?
It looks like it was done so that 7/9 label heads could be placed to the left of their respective points making the whole court appear even more further left than just the ridiculous notion that Roberts is center would do.
The 3-3-3 court stuff is nonsense taken on its own terms. The liberal “wins” are all “plaintiff wants to move the law far to the right of the status quo, but some of the conservatives won’t go that far.” It’s a liberal win relative to what otherwise could have been, but not in any meaningful sense.
What they’re doing here — describing the swing-est justice as a moderate, so as to obscure the rightward drift as the swing vote moved from O’Connor to Kennedy to Roberts — is actively deceptive.
the main problem is that the values on these axes aren’t independent of each other but you could solve it pretty easily by moving the roberts circle directly above the thomas circle
This is the exact same upside-down-V shape as the Media Bias Chart that always makes the rounds. There must be some deep-seated centrist impulse to pick the median and say it’s the best.
There are many reasons those 3 don't belong anywhere close to the center. But you just know if they get enough pushback, Politico's response will be "oh the chart wasn't meant to be taken literally, it's just an illustration" or some such nonsense.
My brother tells me I’m “close minded” for not reading obvious trash like this lol. The whole reason I already know this is trash is because I’ve seen it so many times.
He is a wildcard. He systematically weakened the VRA, dissented in Obergefell, upheld the Muslim ban. But he was important in upholding Obamacare, strengthening Title 7, and cracking down on warrantless searches, among other cases where liberals desperately needed his vote.
