Is it my imagination, or does the US Supreme Court vote 6-3 an awful lot? I thought about it most recently regarding the Texas sodomy laws, which was decided 6-3, but I’ve thought about it before as every ruling I can remember reading about was decided 6-3 as well.
Are there six sensible judges and three dumb ones? Three smart ones, three dumb ones and three constantly undecided ones? Or is it all in my head? Inquiring minds want to know.
I dunno, but Scalia scares me so much I count him as Two.
There seem to be an awful lot of 5-4 rulings from this court, with O’Conner being the deciding vote. In a way she’s kind of running the country.
I feel precisely the same way. Of course, Thomas is such a dunderhead that he hardly counts at all, so we get back to our original count of nine. Nice how it works out that way.
Scalia, Thomas and Rehnquist are a bloc. Pryor, Stevens and Ginsburg are a bloc. That leaves Souter, Kennedy and O’Connor. Souter usually sides with STR and Kennedy usually sides with PSG, which is why O’Connor is the swing vote.
Actually, a paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this week that analyzed Supreme Court decisions. It’s by Lawrence Sirovich. You can read about it here:
http://moronosaurus.blogspot.com
(best viewed with mozilla or IE, and probably Safari - and check the entry for 26 June)
Nearly half the Supreme Court rulings are unanimous, but the next most common ruling is the 5-4 ruling that characterized the Bush-Gore ruling, namely SRTKO vs Souter-Breyer-Ginsburg-Stevens. In nearly every 5-4 ruling, the swing votes are O’Connor and Kennedy.
It turns out that nearly all decisions can be characterized by two dimensions, the first corresponding to the unanimous vote and the second represented by a vector with the following weights:
Thomas +0.41
Scalia +0.40
Rehnquist +0.30
Kennedy +0.17
O’Connor +0.10
Souter -0.31
Breyer -0.33
Ginsburg -0.37
Stevens -0.45
These weights, which are due to a mathematical analysis that does not make use of judicial/psychological/etc analysis, correspond exactly to the conservative-liberal perception of the judges by law experts. Sirovich does not point this out in his original paper, probably because he’s trying not to appear partisan.