Supreme Court resembles a feuding family with arguments that go on for years

WASHINGTON— The Supreme Court often resembles a quarreling family where the same heated debates continue for years.

The justices disagree on race, religion, abortion, guns and the environment, and more recently, presidential power and LGBTQ+ rights. And while they try to maintain a cordial working relationship, they don’t claim to be good friends.

“We are interconnected whether we like it or not,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote last year in her book “Listening to the Law.”

And like it or not, testicle exchanges and boiling anger is increasing due to the impact of sharp ideological divisions.

The three liberals have known since October that the conservative majority was preparing to expand partisan power over racial justice.

The court’s opinion last week by Justice Samuel A. Alito would strike down part of the Voting Rights Act, allowing Republicans across the South to eliminate voting districts that favored Black Democrats.

Justice Elena Kagan, who first came to the court as Justice Thurgood Marshall’s law clerk, condemned the “destruction” of a historic civil rights law.

In dissent, he cited Marshall’s warning that Black citizens would have “meaningless enfranchisement” if all voting districts in the South had a white majority.

But Alito and Chief Justice John G. Roberts joined the court 20 years ago because they believed the government could not make decisions based on race.

Their first major decision was a 5-4 decision that struck down voluntary school integration policies in Seattle and Louisville. Roberts said it is illegal to encourage some students to transfer based on their race.

Roberts, who is facing a redistricting lawsuit from Texas, described it as a “nasty business.” [of] “They divide us by race.”

With three of President Trump’s appointees on the floor, conservatives have a solid majority on changing racial law. Three years ago they repealed universities’ affirmative action policies.

States like Alabama and Louisiana were watching closely.

Voting rights advocates had sued them, and both had been asked to create a second majority-Black congressional district.

State prosecutors appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that these race-based districts were unconstitutional.

In a decision that surprised both parties, Alabama lost in 2023 by a vote of 5-4.

Roberts said the Voting Rights Act, as interpreted by past decisions, shows that Alabama should draw a second congressional district that could elect a Black candidate. The three liberals completely agreed, and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh cast a tentative fifth vote.

Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas filed strong dissenting opinions, joined by Barrett and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

Last year, the justices agreed to rule on a nearly identical challenge from Louisiana, and this time Roberts joined the conservative majority in ceding the opinion to Alito.

He argued that the Voting Rights Act gave “minority voters” the equal right to vote, but not the right to “elect the preferred candidate.”

The decision dealt a double blow to Black Democrats because Roberts’ earlier 5-4 opinion left state lawmakers free to draw voting districts for partisan advantage.

This decision, combined with Wednesday’s decision, will help Republicans maintain their narrow grip on Congress.

As if to emphasize this point, the court Six Republican appointees were guests President Trump’s speech at the King Charles dinner at the White House on Tuesday.

Just a few days earlier, Trump had harshly criticized the court in another social media post.

“Radical Left Democrats do not need to ‘Fill the Field.’ It is Already Filled,” he wrote. “Some ‘Republican’ judges have become weak, stupid and evil.” He said they have eliminated their far-reaching tariffs, “They will probably… decide against our Country on the Birthright Citizenship issue.”

That didn’t stop them from being invited to the White House, nor did their partisan outlook deter them from attending.

Alito is savoring his moment of applause as the voice of the conservative legal movement.

In March, the Federalist Society held a day-long conference in Philadelphia to celebrate “Justice Alito Jurisprudence.”

It became the subject of two new books. One, by journalist Mollie Hemingway, calls her “the justice who reshaped the Supreme Court and restored the Constitution.”

The other is “Revenge of the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement” by author Peter S. Canellos.

Alito went to Princeton during the Vietnam War and was deferred “because of very privileged people acting irresponsibly,” as he later told his classmates.

He later went to Yale Law School and left with an enduring disdain for left-leaning faculty and students like Thomas.

Alito has his own book scheduled for release in October. It’s called “Organized That Way: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country.”

There were rumors and speculation last month that Alito and perhaps Thomas were planning to retire this year so Trump and Senate Republicans could quickly fill their seats.

Alito, 76, is at the peak of his influence and has no intention of resigning. He and Thomas confirmed to news organizations that they do not plan to retire this year.

Alito has been a reliably conservative vote on the Supreme Court for 20 years, regularly arguing that the law should be moved further to the right.

Most famously, Roe vs. It was the court’s 5-4 opinion in the Dobbs case that overturned Wade and the constitutional right to abortion.

Roberts filed a partial dissent, arguing that the court should have upheld Mississippi’s 16-week limit on abortion and stopped there.

Alito called religion a “neutral right,” and a shift is taking place there, too.

In the decades before his arrival, the court had issued consistent decisions barring taxpayer funds for religious schools or religious ceremonies or symbols in public schools or city parks.

The court then considered these official “endorsements” of religion to be violations of the 1st Amendment’s prohibition on the “establishment” of religion or the principle of separation of church and state.

However, these decisions remained in the background.

Instead, Alito, Roberts and four other conservatives see today’s threat not as official favoritism toward religion but as discrimination against religion.

They ran church schools and their students could not be denied state aid because of religion. Catholic charities and other religious groups similarly cannot be excluded from publicly funded programs because they refuse to accept same-sex parents, the justices said.

They upheld a football coach’s right to pray on the field. And they ruled in favor of a wedding cake maker in Colorado and other business owners who refused to serve same-sex couples in violation of the state’s civil rights law.

Religious freedom has now replaced separation of church and state as the winning formula at the Supreme Court.

The next test on this front may come from Louisiana, which has called for the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms.

The court has ruled in the past that such religious displays violate the 1st Amendment, but it is unclear whether the current majority would agree.

The court’s oral arguments regarding this period ended last week. Most were dominated by questions from liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

A. Adam Feldman’s statistical tally Scotusblog found that Jackson, the newest justice, spoke twice as many words as the most talkative of the conservative justices.

His arrival shifted “the center of verbal energy” to the liberal side, Feldman wrote. While Jackson “sits in a class of his own,” Sotomayor makes the argument on the liberal side.

The court now has about eight weeks to issue rulings on the remaining 35 cases. Generally, the months of May and June can be a difficult period due to intense differences of opinion on recent cases.

But for liberal judges, this can also be a period of mostly dissenting writing.