My Reason<\/em> colleague Nick Gillespie recently sat down with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch for a conversation about Gorsuch’s new children’s book, Heroes of 1776: The Story of the Declaration of Independence<\/em><\/a>, coauthored with Janie Nitze, plus other topics more directly tied to Gorsuch’s day job. The whole interview is well worth watching<\/a>, but I wanted to focus today’s Injustice System<\/em> newsletter on two points that particularly caught my attention.<\/p>\n

1. ‘Scrambled Every Which Way’<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Americans are increasingly unhappy with the actions of the federal government, including the actions of the Supreme Court, whose own approval ratings have reached a new low<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Is Gorsuch worried about that? He told Gillespie that the Supreme Court is doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing. He also said that the Court is serving as a kind of role model of respectful and principled adjudication while doing it.<\/p>\n

“I think we do pretty darn well,” Gorsuch said, arguing that the Court takes on “the 70 hardest cases in the country” and “we’re unanimous, the nine of us, about 40 percent of the time.” As for the split decisions, he added, “only about half of those are the five-fours or six-threes you’re thinking about,” meaning the cases in which there was a clear divide between conservatives and liberals. “The others are scrambled every which way.”<\/p>\n

Gorsuch’s own record helps to illustrate the point. On criminal justice matters, he is often “scrambled” in alliance with liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor while he regularly butts heads<\/a> with conservative Justice Samuel Alito. The usual ideological labels are not necessarily so helpful in such cases.<\/p>\n

This point from Gorsuch is a good reminder that if you are thinking about the Supreme Court only in terms of right-left divides, you run the risk of misunderstanding, or even missing, a non-negligible part of what is really going on.<\/p>\n