The Supreme Court is political. [Hold for applause.]

It’s one of the easiest taglines in our current public discourse. The Court sits at historically low public-approval ratings, hovering between the high 30s and low 40s. You would be better off criticizing Congress or Kanye West but only slightly.

What exactly do we mean when we say the Court is political, though? The answer can vary, of course, but typically it boils down to: (1) The justices reverse engineer their legal (or “legal”) analysis to yield preferred policy outcomes, and (2) I don’t like those outcomes. Conservatives have prevailed more often than liberals recently, so naturally we’ve seen a widening gap in perception; over 70 percent of Democrats disapprove of the Court, compared with only 26 percent of Republicans. It’s easy to like the Court when you win, and aspersions flow freely when you lose.

The Supreme Court’s October 2025 term is now over, and the results at once reinforce and undermine glib assertions about its political tendencies. Yes, the Court is political but not quite in the sense liberals often proffer: “It’s a partisan 6-3 majority that reflexively rules for Trump and conservative causes on every big case.”

It’s true the justices reached a 6-3 conservative-to-liberal split on several important rulings this term. Witness, for example, the 6-3 decision in the Louisiana redistricting case that tore down the last remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act and opened the door to the dissolution of majority-Black congressional districts in the South. Or consider Monday’s ruling permitting the president to fire the heads of executive-branch regulatory agencies (except for the Federal Reserve) for essentially any reason he wants or no reason at all.

But some of this term’s 6-3 decisions are attributable more to differences in judicial methodology than to politics. Take last week’s pair of rulings upholding draconian Trump-administration immigration policies — one that severely........

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