Major Shift Towards the Rich, SCOTUS
I am not a legal expert. I have followed cases from the beginning and through SCOTUS. I tend to agree there is a bias within the Court that favors business or wealthy interests rather than the general public. I have not looked at the study. I will tomorrow and add in the comments section of this post.
Much of the shift existed years before. Perhaps, it became more prominent now? There has always been a suspicion of bias.
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“Supreme Court’s major shift towards the rich mapped out by experts,” Alternet.org
An extensive new study from a team of Ivy League economists has uncovered just how much the Supreme Court has shifted towards favoring the wealthier side in any given case, with a New York Times report concluding report concluding that you can “follow the money” to determine how it will in any given case.
The new study, dubbed “Ruling for the Rich,” was published on Monday and hailed from the team of Yale’s Fiona Scott Morton, Columbia’s Andrea Prat and Columbia’s Jacob Spitz. Adam Liptak, the leading Supreme Court correspondent for the Times, dug into its findings, noting that “the wealthy have the wind at their backs before the justices,” and questioning whether or not they are living up to their oath to “do equal right to the poor and to the rich.”
Per Liptak’s analysis, the study found that Republican appointees, who have held a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court since 2020 and an overall majority for much longer, are “far more likely than Democratic ones to side with the wealthy.” Adding “the Supreme Court has become deeply polarized in cases pitting the rich against the poor.”
This is now in sharp contrast to the court of the mid-20th Century, “when appointees of the two parties were statistically indistinguishable” in terms of favoring wealthier parties.
Specifically, the study found that Republican-appointed justices sided with wealthier parties in cases around 70 percent of the time. By comparison, in 1953, conservative justices sided with them only 45 percent of the time.
Speaking with Liptak about the findings, Adam Cohen, author of the book “Supreme Inequality,” noted that the study essentially reiterated ideas about the court’s conduct that “some of us have been observing for a long time.”
“But it is great to see,” Cohen added. “Respected academics crunching the numbers and producing the data to show that this is exactly what has been going on.”
These findings come as leaders in both political parties are ramping up plans to radically alter their campaign finance plans ahead of an upcoming decision, in which the court is widely expected to lift the limits on how much party committees and campaigns are allowed to coordinate with each other. This, experts argue, would hand even more power to the wealthiest donors and further erode the power of small-dollar donors.
Thomas Kika, Alternet
Drilled down a few layers. Looks kind of dodgy. Two major problems that I see. First they do not consider qualifying data from unanimous cases. They should not do that. If the metric is “rich vote/poor vote” and the factor is “party identification of the justice’s nominating President” there is no good rationale for excluding 9-0 decisions if they qualify on the metric. They do explain they are going to do this specifically, so that’s a little goodness, but you still are left with a study of a factor that excludes data subject to that factor on no serious grounds at all. If it’s a real factor, then it needs to apply to every data point. I have not dug so deep as to see if they tell us the extent of this exclusion, but the exclusion is profoundly suspect.
Second, the authors tell us that they allow speculative concepts to serve as “rich” or “poor”. For abortion cases they allow the idea that a poor woman might otherwise have a job but for an abortion limitation. I suppose that’s true in cases, but demonstrably rich women face the same restrictions, plus what does it even mean in Dobbs, for example, to say a state legislature is “rich”? Additionally if Dobbs harms the poor woman, you can argue that it helps that woman’s child who is weaker still.
My take is that they got rid of valid data that would only serve to shrink the facto’s apparent influence and also expanded their metric in debatable ways so as to capture cases they wanted to include. Dodgy.
Eric:
Enlighten me, how did we get to talking about abortion from this post?