By Barrett’s own definition, the Supreme Court is full of partisan hacks

Chief Justice John Roberts unfailingly insists that he and his colleagues are not “political actors.” But when the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices recently voted to effectively nullify a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, they indeed revealed themselves as guarantors of the Republican Party’s national agenda. 

Don’t take my word for it. No less an authority than Justice Amy Coney Barrett has described how to determine whether the justices are neutral arbiters of the law or political operatives in robes. The Republican-appointed super-majority has failed the test.

Shortly after her confirmation to the Supreme Court, Barrett spoke at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, where she was introduced by Mitch McConnell himself, who was then the Republican Senate majority leader.

“My goal today,” Barrett told her audience, “is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” Her proposed method, she continued, is asking whether the “decision seems results-oriented.”

“Read the opinion,” Barrett later explained in a talk at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and then decide whether it is “designed to impose the policy preferences of the majority,” or if it reads “like it actually is an honest effort and persuasive effort, even if one you ultimately don’t agree with, to determine what the Constitution and precedent requires?”

Barrett got the test almost right; it should have been “read the opinions,” plural.  

Any smart judge can make a single opinion seem coherent and logical. It is only by comparing multiple opinions that a pattern of political favoritism can be seen to emerge. Do the decisions consistently........

© The Hill