William_T._Bianco,_David_T._Canon]_American_Polit

518

WHAT DO

THE FACTS

S AY?

The Shifting Ideological Balance

of the Court

After Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016, the open seat on the Supreme Court

became a major issue in the presidential election. Why? As this figure shows, when justices

are replaced, the ideological shifts can be quite large (as when Thurgood Marshall, a very

liberal justice, was replaced by a strong conservative, Clarence Thomas) or nonexistent

(as when Sonia Sotomayor replaced David Souter—they both were moderate liberals).

Many people said that replacing Scalia with Merrick Garland would have drastically altered

the ideological makeup of the Court, given the 4–4 split on the Court between liberal and

conservative justices. When Scalia was replaced by Neil Gorsuch instead of Garland, what

happened to the ideological balance of the Court? Then, when Kennedy retired in 2018,

he was replaced by conservative Brett Kavanaugh, whose ideological score has not been

calulated as of November 2018, and the center of the Court was kept in about the same

place. What do the facts say?

• Look at where Scalia is on the ideological scale. If Hillary Clinton had been
  elected, where would Scalia’s dot have likely moved?


• Did the median justice change with the addition of Neil Gorsuch to the Court?


• Merrick Garland probably would have been at about −0.5 on the scale. What
  would have happened to the median justice if he had been confirmed in 2016?


• What happened when John Roberts replaced Kennedy as the median justice
  for the 2018 term?

Think about it

1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

4

3

2

1

0

More conservative

More liberal

–1

–2

–3

–4

–5

Thomas

Median

for the term

Kennedy

Ginsburg

Breyer

Blackmun

White

O’Connor

Rehnquist

Alito Scalia Gorsuch

Roberts

Souter Kagan

Stevens

Marshall

Sotomayor

?

Arrows represent a shift in ideology when a vacancy is filled on the Court,

either to a more conservative or more liberal justice.

Each dot represents the ideology of the incoming and outgoing justice.

Dotted line represents hypothetical shift in ideology.

Garland

Source: The Upshot, “A Supreme Court with

Merrick Garland Would Be the Most Liberal in

Decades,” http://www.nytimes.com (accessed 8/16/18);

data for Scalia and Gorsuch are from Martin

Quinn Scores, Measures, http://mqscores.lsa.

umich.edu/measures.php; estimate for

Garland from Adam Bonica, et al., “New Data

Show How Liberal Merrick Garland Really Is,”

washingtonpost.com (accessed 8/16/18).

Chapter 14 | The Courts

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