Visualizing the Ideological History of SCOTUS

langelgjm writes "An interesting exercise in quantifying and visualizing ideological shifts, the website ScotusScores.com tracks changes in the ideological history of the US Supreme Court from 1937 to 2007. Ideological positions are quantified using Martin-Quinn scores, and the chart highlights the often-bumpy transitions (Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas), as well as tendencies within each Justice's career."

Comments

Going to be more changes soon

[realnrh]

Souter's leaving, Ginsburg is likely to leave in the next two or three years (to ensure that Obama gets to choose her replacement), Stevens is likely to do the same... and all of them are considered likely at this point to be replaced by more distinctly progressive justices, since for the first time in decades there's a Democratic President with a Democratic Senate that can actually confirm his choices easily. None of the hard-right justices (Scalia, Alito, Thomas, or Roberts) is going to be stepping down voluntarily any time soon, but Kennedy might be getting some inclinations that way based on not being fond of being the constant swing vote, subject to pressures from all of his colleagues all the time.

Re:Going to be more changes soon

[JordanL]

I always get a kick out of people who think that SCOTUS justices go through that much effort to time their replacement.

Many, though not all, Justices have little interest in the particular politics of the week, and have more concern for whether or not their replacement will bring a decorum, sensibility and intelligence to the court which befits the seat which they are giving up.

I doubt Ginsburg will conciously wait until the Dems have a supermajority for the purpose of stuffing something down the republicans throats. And I also seriously doubt the dems (or the Repubs) getting a supermajority period for the foreseeable future.

Voters in this country have pretty much spoken: you have one term to make a difference, or they'll find someone else who will.

I don't think that has to do with party lines as much as frustration, and honestly I view THAT as a good thing.

Re:Going to be more changes soon

[Lord Kano]

It's a matter of trying to shape reality. If they're "Progressive" they must be in favor of progress. If someone opposed progress, they must be bad.

Not all change is progress.

LK

Re:Going to be more changes soon

[tverbeek]

I don't know Kennedy,* but unless he's an unusual lawyer, he probably loves being the swing vote. In effect it's like having the STAR chamber** for the prosecution, the weak-lefties for the defense, and he gets to listen to their arguments and decide the case. Or in cases where he already has a firm viewpoint on the subject, he can use his position in the middle to frame the terms of the decision. If he doesn't find that appealing, he should retire, because he's gotten tired of the Law.

*Insert Bentsen/Quayle joke here.
**Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts

I like visualization

[iluvcapra]

Tufte might grouse though about all the small fonts and the overloading of the vertical axis...

Some things jump right out at me...

• You can see the often-reported phenomenon of justices generally getting more liberal the longer they stay on the court. Conervative justices in particular tend to trend mellower and mellower over time.
• You can see how some justices, like Frankfurter, will trend contra the overall trend of the court. As the court got bluer into the 50s, he got redder.
• How is it that SEVEN of the nine justices who voted in favor of Brown were conservative? There's no way that case would get a unanimous decision today, and conservatives today are much more moderate on social issues than they were in the 50s. This is probably an artifact of the single-dimension grading process than anything else. Alot of Progressive Democrats through WW2 and into the 50s were happy to call themselves racist, and many Republicans still marginally considered themslves enlightened party-of-Lincoln non-racists. There was a big realignment of constiuencies around '68, and this tends to skew the definitional "liberal"/"conservative" meanings.

Re:I like visualization

[Anonymous Coward]

You can see the often-reported phenomenon of justices generally getting more liberal

No, you can't. Taking the last score for a judge minus the first score for the same judge, 18 judges became bluer by at least 0.05 and 15 became redder by at least 0.05 (six judges changed by less than 0.05 first to last).

Re:I like visualization

[jmorris42]

> Alot of Progressive Democrats through WW2 and into the 50s were happy to call themselves racist,
> and many Republicans still marginally considered themslves enlightened party-of-Lincoln
> non-racists. There was a big realignment of constiuencies around '68, and this tends to skew
> the definitional "liberal"/"conservative" meanings.

Not exactly. whne public opinon on racism turned against it the Progressives in the media, academy and the arts did a fast pivot and suddenly racism was a conservative/republican thing. The official histories were rewritten and now Republicans have ALWAYS been racists and Democrats have ALWAYS been the enlightened folk. But it ain't so.

To hear modern 'historians' tell it Lincoln was a Democrat, the labels have just swapped somehow.

Nope. Go look at old history. The Solid South was all Democrat until the late 1970's. Seriously, most Southern states didn't elect their first Republican Governor or Senator until then. All those bigots you see in the grainy newsreels turning water hoses and dogs on people, yup every last one of them was a Democrat.

Democrats hated Lincoln (the first Republican POTUS) even more than that hate Bush (the most recent Republican POTUS). So from Lincoln to Bush the Republicans have a pretty good record on the race issue. Debate all you want about other aspects of the Bush record but the diversity of his administration is not really debatable. Meanwhile Bill Clinton was hailed as the 'first black president' at the time but had a pretty darned monochome group of people around him.

And at this point the doubters will bring up Nixon and his "Southern Strategy." No. Total myth. Nixon was many bad things, stupid wasn't one of them. Go hit wikipedia and examine the election returns. Note the third candidate. Ok, remember that southern bigots HATED Republicans. Hated with a white hot hate that would never die. (the idiots dying off was the way it ended as things turned out) So you are a Southern Yellow Dog Democrat and you have McGovern, Nixon and Wallace to pick from. Oh yea, you are going to pick Nixon. Riight. We are to believe Nixon thought he could out bigot George Wallace without alienating the northern Republicans.

Note that there is ONE Kleagle of the Klan seated in the US Congress. He is not a Republican.

This should be enough to put the "Republicans are racists" myth is put in question. (It can't be 'debunked' in a slashdot post, all I can hope for is to plant some seeds of doubt. It is up to YOU to follow up and learn the Truth for yourself.) Now lets examine the other side a bit more.

As noted above, the south was almost enturely Southern Democrats. But the racism of the Democratic Party was by no means a Southern thang. It permeates the entire 'Progressive' project. Go read Jonah Goldberg's _Liberal Fascism_ to get a full exploration of the connection between today's Democratic Party, the old Progressive movement, the Communists AND the Fascists and Nazis. Yes, including the noxious ideas on race.

In this space lets let one example serve to get the curious asking questions about the accuracy of the history they have been taught. Take Hillary Clinton's 'hero' Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. Go dig into this central figure of the Progressive movement a bit. Lets just say it isn't an accident most of their efforts were (and still are) concentrated in the areas with large 'ethnic' populations. Crazy bitch was quite open (as most of the early Progressives were) about her notions regarding culling out the fast breeding but inferior breeds.

Re:I like visualization

[iluvcapra]

I'm not sure what you're trying to prove, but your account of "modern historians" seems to come out of thin air; no historian within the realm of citation has ever claimed Lincoln was a Democrat, or that the labels got "swapped" somehow. The Republican party isn't essentially racist; US political parties don't essentially stand for anything. The racist block of poor southern whites simply just stopped voting Dem and stated voting Republican after the LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act. Southerners had been wary of the Democratic coalition ever since FDR, but he was able to keep them in the tent by buying them off with federal allocations on projects like the TVA and rural electrificatio. The dead hand of this is still with us: the federal government still over-allocates to states that were critical to the dixiecrat electoral block.

The assertion that the southern strategy was a myth is prima facie ridiculous-- there's decades of documentation and scholarship, and most of the originators, including Phillips, Moynihan and Buchanan acknowledge that it exists and played a critical role in forming the post-Voting Rights Act Republican coalition. They stripped the Democratic party of dixiecrats by becoming a party of states' rights, opposing federal writ when it came to affirmative action and busing.

Goldberg's thesis is ahistorical. He tries to draw progressivism and liberalism together with socialism and fascism, but he reduces partisan alignment to philosophy. People vote for socialists without believing in socialism, because the fact is that most parties who declare themselves socialist, or fascist, or liberal simply aren't. Socialists, which were called "Social Democrats" in Germany were hell-bent against National-Socialists in Germany; and both detested the Communists. Progressives in the US had a strong historical relationship to the church, and while areligious progressives in the 30s favored eugenics policies religious ones absolutely did not. And all of this is separate from Sanger, unless you consider birth control tantamount to eugenics, which a lot of people honestly disagree with. The "liberal fascism" argument is born out of the belief that people identify with political parties because they share a common set of beliefs, and that beliefs fall on a continuum. They don't. People don't vote Socialist because they want a Socialist form of government, and the more socialist it gets, the happier they are. People vote Socialist (or Communist, Fascist, Liberal, whatever) because that party promises X, Y, and Z, and the voter decides which party's platform best conicides with their self-interest. Goldberg sees the world through a lens of ideological purity, where parties are evaluated in terms of their consistency to some dogma, as opposed to their ability to deliver on promises to their interest groups, which is actually how people decide what parties to join.

Re:I like visualization

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the theory we are given but I live in the South. The South became Republican as the old Yellow Dog Democrats started dying out. In the main those old guys never forgave the Republicans for Lincoln's "war Crimes", they just finally died out. A few of the less radicalized younger ones eventually flipped parties, mostly due to Reagan not Nixon.

I live in the south, too. In Jesse Helms's constituency (where the schools were segregated by law until the '70s when the feds finally intervened). And your contention is a revisionist fantasy.

The south went Republican, not because of Nixon or Reagan, but in direct response to Johnson's voting rights act. Strom Thurmond saw the civil rights writing on the wall and switched parties in '64. Jesse changed parties during Nixon's first term. Both of them lived for a very long time after making the switch.

SCOTUS should not be driven by ideology.

[reporter]

The Supreme Court of the USA (SCOTUS) should not be driven by ideology. The role of the judge is simply to apply the law impartially. Note that if SCOTUS had applied the law impartially in the early half of the 20th century, SCOTUS would have ruled that laws enforcing segregation are illegal.

Consider the case of the firefighters in New Haven. If the SCOTUS decides this case on the sole basis of the legal statutes (that government shall not hire or promote on the basis of skin color), then the results of the exam will be upheld. All the white firefighters and the 1 Hispanic firefighter should be promoted. If the SCOTUS decides this case on the basis of ideology (i. e., the idea that racial quotas are in the best interest of the USA regardless of the law), then the results of the exam will be rescinded, denying promotion to the firefighters.

These days, the SCOTUS is expected to be ideological. So, political parties, lobbyists, and any other political critter will try his hardest to support a candidate (for justice of SCOTUS) who (1) is willing to make a decision on the basis of ideology and (2) exhibits the ideology that the political critter supports.

Re:SCOTUS should not be driven by ideology.

[crumbz]

Unfortunately it is impossible for any person to apply the law to a particular case impartially. Judges are human beings who take their own prejudices and worldviews into the court, it is not simply left at the door. For example, Assoc. Justice Scalia appears to have chosen "originalism" as his approach to interpreting the U.S. Constitution. This approach elevates the plain meaning of the text, as understood by the framers, as the main criterion for judicial review. Thus, when the constitution is silent on a matter, such as the right to privacy, the existence of this right is left to the legislature and not appropriate for the judiciary to decide. However, Scalia's view is but one interpretation of the constitution, among many competing views. Expecting judges to not decide opinions on the basis of their ideological preferences is idealistic and naive.

Re:SCOTUS should not be driven by ideology.

[iluvcapra]

If the SCOTUS decides this case on the sole basis of the legal statutes (that government shall not hire or promote on the basis of skin color), then the results of the exam will be upheld.

I don't see how you can just state that ad arguendo. If a court finds in favor of New Haven, they are strictly applying federal law. Federal law might be quota-ist, but it's the law. Is the court supposed to write its own laws, or apply it's own reading of the constitution when the Congress has specifically stated that it interprets the Constitution differently? Conservatives only want "impartial rulings" and "strict construction" when it takes destroys people's civil rights and substantive due process, and when a court actually finds impartially for those things, they demand activism. Both sides play this game. Just find good judges and let them do their job-- throw them out if they're corrupt, but otherwise if they can convince 4 of their peers, give them the benefit of the doubt.

Re:SCOTUS should not be driven by ideology.

[AuMatar]

The definition of "activist judge"- any judge who rules against the way I want.

Re:SCOTUS should not be driven by ideology.

[jmorris42]

What we get is erratic judging because bad precedent piles on previous bad precedent. But it is just post modern twaddle to assert that impartial judging is impossible. There are some pretty clear guideposts to judge the quality of a court's judging by.

what should good judging look like? Here are some rules of thumb.

1. What we want is the Rule of Law and not the Rule of Men. This means we need a dead Constitution, not a living one. The Constitution has to mean what it meant when it was written. Yes it CAN change, but only by the Amendment process, not judges deciding 'society has changed' or 'evolving standards'.

2. The best measure of whether you have the Rule of Law is whether people know what the rules are in advance. The Founders tried to make that possible by building in lots of sane defaults. Then they added the Bill of Rights to add more clarity with lots of "Congress shall pass no law..." and "shall not be infringed" short of language to clearly define limits to the powers of the Federal Government and topped off with the 9th and 10th Amendments to attempt to put the government in a small clearly defined area. Basically, unless it is clearly specified that something IS something the Federal Government controls the default answer is NO, the government can't do it.

It really shouldn't take much thought to figure out how the Supremes SHOULD rule on most questions. The problem is even the most strict originalists lack both the numbers and the courage to break with precedent and clean out most of the Federal government and thus have to weasel their way to slowly try to push the law in originalist directions without wholesale renunciation of precedent.

3. How would a court full of Vulcans or correctly operating expert systems rule? Working correctly the court would be bored to death because everyone on the lower courts would know how the Supreme Court would rule, and even most of the litigants would know, thus few cases would ever be appealed to them. But because with our current broken system neither side has a frickin clue how any given court, including the SCOTUS, will rule we get endless court action. Heck, by the time your case works its way up the makeup of the SCOTUS will probably change.

Some examples might make these ideas more understandable:

Roe v Wade: The Constitution is silent on abortion thus the 10th reserves it as an issue for the States. The Feds can neither outlaw abortion nationwide or forbid the States from outlawing it. Citizenship is defined as 'born or naturalized' so the pro-life argument that a fetus is a baby may or may not have merit, but that a fetus isn't a Citizen is black letter law as the Constitution is currently written.

McCain/Feingold: What part of Congress shall make no law... is beyond the comprehension of the Honorable Senators? Note that the entirety of the Campaign Finance regulatory regime fails this test along with most of the FEC regulatory machinery.

somewhat misleading color coding

[target]

One of the things that immediately struck me was that the conservative judges seemed to be more conservative than the liberal judges were liberal, based on the vividness of the color. Aha, I thought, I knew the liberals were more moderate!

But actually I think that's an artifact of the way the coloring was done. Look at Rehnquist as an associate and see the vivid red that his first year shows as, which is 3.98. Now look at Thurgood Marshall, below him, and find a -3.95. Those should look pretty similar in terms of intensity, but the blue looks much closer to white than the red does.

What I think is happening is this. They are color coding not on absolutes like that, but based on the distance between 0 and the most conservative or liberal number. But the most liberal justice is at -6, which the most conservative one is only at -5. So if you get a 4, that's 80% of the way to being the most conservative, but someone who is equivalently liberal at -4 is only 66% of the way to being the most liberal. So they get a color that looks like they are 66 points away from moderate as opposed to 80 points for the conservatives.

Well that's misleading. I think the color gradation changes need to be symmetrical across the graph or it's going to be super confusing. Maybe just call -5 the most liberal you can be and don't worry about shading Douglas more? Or make 6 the most conservative you can be and give up the super deep red color for now.

Re:Interesting, but why so limited?

[iluvcapra]

I think that's sortof a doomed project, because "liberal" and "conservative" are very overloaded and our defintions don't apply to previous eras properly. Most "centrists" in the 1850s would have held a meliorist but tolerant attitude toward slavery, and most fundie Christians, up until the cold war, were populist and redistributionist. Read a William Jennings Bryan or Father Coughlin speech and see how strange their ideology is compared to how we draw the lines today; on the other hand there were people like Robert LaFolette and Neslon Rockefeller, who were rock-ribbed Republicans and conservative in a way, but completely unrecognizable to the current consensus.

A more usefuls scoring might be evaluating how federalist vs. centralist decisions are, or how strongly do the judges define a "taking." Over the arc of US History, many aspects of our discourse have become remarkably small-l liberal, like our attitude toward racism and slavery, while other aspects have trended more small-c conservative, like our attitude toward taxation and civic religion.

Re:The Constitution is LAW

[johnsonav]

To specifically avoid the ambiguity that the British non-constitution has, the Founders made sure the document was written, written well in clear lucid writing and signed by all the Founders as a sort of ratification.

Oh yeah: "Unreasonable", "necessary and proper", "probable cause", "due process", "cruel and unusual". Yep, nothing to interpret there.

Wait a minute...

the Constitution is a Treaty

[tjstork]

The correct interpretation of the Constitution is that it is a treaty among the states to cede some limited power to the federal government. You don't want to go randomly inventing new terms or "living" it out because that changes the terms of the deal that binds the states together. Think of the Constitution as a TOS for the US Federal Gov't. Every time a court changes it, its a TOS change without your consent.

And it should not need to.

The Constitution does not give people rights, as the left is fond of saying, it is that the government only has limited powers and the states and people have all the rest. Thus, even if there was no 2nd amendment, the federal government would STILL be not allowed to regulate firearms. But of course, people just trample the constitution and on both sides of the aisle. The EPA, DOE, and many other left wing laws are clearly unconstitutional, but so too are things like the defense of marriage act..

Re:the Constitution is a Treaty

[jmorris42]

> The Constitution does not grant the Congress an explicitly enumerated power to regulate marriage.

No it doesn't. But it is still one of the more interesting questions the court will eventually have to settle. Both sides can make a strong originalist case. Observe:

The DOMA isn't about marriage per se, it is about clarifying the Full Faith and Credit clause in the Constitution. The word marriage has a specific meaning. Some states have suddenly decided (mostly by judicial fiat, but we now have some states which did it correctly) the word has a different meaning. If State A redefines a word that redefinition is not required to be accepted by State B. So just because two men are "Married" in Vermont does not mean West Virginia has to accept that their marriage laws have been redefined in ways that make a mockery of the purpose of those laws as understood in West Virginia.

The other side just has to mention that it wasn't too many years back that "Marriage" didn't include mixed race couples in quite a few states and the courts ruled that such a marriage was valid in every state. Right there you are most of the way to winning the argument. And Nevada was notorious for it's divorce laws. And marriages involving girls so young it would be statutory rape in most states wasn't illegal so long as you kept that marriage license handy. And finally, had not Utah not been required to renounce bigamy before admission to the Union their marriages would have almost certainly been legal nationwide.

So both sides can make a case, which way to rule? Most cases I can get on my soapbox and declare a winner. Can't on this one.

Re:The Constitution is LAW

[nomadic]

Actually, if you knew your Constitutional history you'd realize that the Constitution was a result of many compromises, and some of the ambiguities were intentionally so in order to get enough support for its ratification.

Just read it. Too many things (like "commerce between the states") are left undefined.No, it doesn't. As an example, let me pick the most non-controversial one (by Slashdot standards) I can think of off the top of my head, the Fourth Amendment. Here's one of the questions they throw at you in law school:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The first clause says people are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the second clause says no warrants without certain requirements. Does this mean that you need a warrant to arrest people? There are two ways to read it; the first is that the two clauses are connected and a warrant is necessary for all arrests, the other is that arrests just need to be reasonable, and that if a police officer chooses to get a warrant, then it must be supported by oath or affirmation, etc. Both are valid readings of the text, with two very different results.

Useless

[Geoffrey.landis]

This is completely useless. Some guys named Martin and Quinn estimate positions on a political spectrum using "Martin Quinn scores", which are not explained (the link to the explanation explains nothing.)

So, what, they guess the justices' politics and then graph their guesses?

If they don't explain how they calculated the numbers, this data is useless, or possibly worse than useless, being opinion masquerading as fact.