It’s a 6-3 Supreme Court: Ideological splits mount ahead of major end-of-term rulings

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court hit an inauspicious milestone Tuesday as it raced to finish its most divisive pending cases by the end of the month: It has already handed down more 6-3 decisions along ideological lines than it did for the entire term that ended last year.

As it navigates a charged political atmosphere during President Donald Trump’s second term and endures sharp criticism from the left and right, the court has already split into conservative and liberal camps in seven decisions this year — one more than last year — before it even gets to major cases on presidential power and transgender rights.

Some of those decisions, including on whether Trump may fire officials at independent federal agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, may also divide the court along ideological lines. The justices are scheduled to drop their next batch of opinions on Thursday.

Four of the five decisions the court released Tuesday were 6-3. Those included a ruling that barred a Rastafarian man from suing prison officials who violated a federal law when they cut his dreadlocks and a decision that permitted Exxon to sue over property confiscated by the Cuban government in 1960.

The most significant 6-3 decision so far this term was the court’s April ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act’s power over redistricting disputes. The decision, and several that followed from it, helped Republicans quickly redraw congressional district in Southern states like Louisiana and Alabama to give the GOP an advantage in this year’s midterm elections.

And those numbers do not take into account rulings on the court’s emergency docket, where the liberal and conservative wings have split more frequently.

“The court’s tendency to decide important cases along 6-3 partisan lines is a serious problem for the court’s legitimacy,” said David Cole, a Georgetown Law professor who frequently argued before the court as the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The justices are supposed to be guided by law, not politics.”

“Even if many divides reflect differences in legal worldview, not politics, the more they divide along party lines, the less credibility the court has as an institution,” Cole said.

To be sure, some of the most important cases this term have brought liberal and conservative justices together. The court’s decision in February to invalidate Trump’s sweeping global tariffs counted three conservatives and three liberals in the majority. Last week, the court unanimously decided that the Second Amendment barred the government from disarming a Texas man just because he frequently smokes pot.

But the number of 6-3 ideological decisions is often trotted out by the court’s critics and its supporters as both attempt to frame the court’s direction as they lodge and parry criticism of how the court is resolving politically fraught issues. The justices themselves will often brush aside the 6-3 outcomes and point out the large share of cases that are decided unanimously, even though those usually involve more technical questions with far less reach.

“It bothers me because it’s not accurate,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative, said last month at the George W. Bush Presidential Center of the focus on 6-3 decisions. The far higher share of opinions that are decided unanimously, Barrett said, “is not the narrative that’s portrayed in the media.”

Speaking at the Reagan Library last month, Justice Neil Gorsuch made a similar point.

“Nine old people appointed by five different presidents over the course of 30 years from all around the country, and we are able to resolve cases lower courts disagreed on unanimously 40% of the time,” said Gorsuch, who was Trump’s first nominee to the high court. “I think that’s something.”

The high court has decided more than half of its 46 decisions so far this term unanimously, a slightly higher share than last year by the end of June. But the biggest and most complicated decisions delivered in the final days of a term are rarely unanimous. With a dozen cases still waiting for a ruling this year, the share of unanimous cases will likely plummet.

From 2020 to 2024, nearly 14% of the court’s merits decisions were split along ideological lines, according to data compiled by SCOTUSblog.

Even before the court turned toward its final month, the justices increasingly were sniping at one another — in written opinions and in public — over their role in the redistricting cases.

“Courts are apolitical,” liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s most junior justice, said last month. “We have to be scrupulous about sticking to the principles and the rules that we apply in every case and not look as though we’re doing something different in this kind of context.”

Jackson’s point echoed a dissent she wrote in an emergency docket case days earlier involving Louisiana’s ability to quickly redraw its congressional districts. Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s conservative wing, responded in a brief concurring opinion by describing Jackson’s points as “trivial at best” and “baseless and insulting.”

“What principle has the court violated?” Alito wrote. “The principle that we should never take any action that might unjustifiably be criticized as partisan?”

In addition to the decisions Tuesday on religion and Exxon’s ability to sue Cuban entities, the court split 6-3 in a decision that will make it easier for the government to deport green card holders who are convicted of certain crimes. It also split along ideological lines on the most substantial holding of a decision that blocks members of the Falun Gong religious movement from suing Cisco for selling equipment to the Chinese government they said aided and abetted the group’s torture.

Major decisions coming

Over the next week, the court is expected to rule on Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship as it has been understood for more than a century as well as the president’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Based on the oral arguments, those decisions may well wind up with some conservatives and liberals together in the majority.

But also pending are cases dealing with the president’s power to fire the leaders of other independent agencies, turn away asylum seekers at the border and cancel temporary deportation protections for Haitian and Syrian nationals. The court is considering an important Second Amendment case over a Hawaii law that makes it harder to carry guns into private property open to the public, like retail stores.

And it is weighing two cases dealing with laws enacted by West Virginia and Idaho that ban transgender girls from competing on girls’ sports teams.

All of those are candidates for splitting the court 6-3.

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