By Barrett’s own definition, the Supreme Court is full of partisan hacks

Chief Justice John Roberts unfailingly insists that he and his colleagues are not “political actors.” But when the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices recently voted to effectively nullify a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, they indeed revealed themselves as guarantors of the Republican Party’s national agenda. Don’t take my word for it. No less an authority than Justice Amy Coney Barrett has described how to determine whether the justices are neutral arbiters of the law or political operatives in robes. The Republican-appointed super-majority has failed the test. Shortly after her confirmation to the Supreme Court, Barrett spoke at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, where she was introduced by Mitch McConnell himself, who was then the Republican Senate majority leader. “My goal today,” Barrett told her audience, “is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” Her proposed method, she continued, is asking whether the “decision seems results-oriented.” “Read the opinion,” Barrett later explained in a talk at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and then decide whether it is “designed to impose the policy preferences of the majority,” or if it reads “like it actually is an honest effort and persuasive effort, even if one you ultimately don’t agree with, to determine what the Constitution and precedent requires?” Barrett got the test almost right; it should have been “read the opinions,” plural. Any smart judge can make a single opinion seem coherent and logical. It is only by comparing multiple opinions that a pattern of political favoritism can be seen to emerge. Do the decisions consistently follow what the “precedent requires,” as Barrett puts it, or do they change course to reach political outcomes? When it comes to voting rights, we do not need to look far. Two Supreme Court cases, each decided by the right-wing majority, contradict one another. Unsurprisingly, both resulted in Republican electoral advantages. In the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause, the court declined to invalidate heavily gerrymandered congressional districts, clearly drawn to disadvantage one political party, on the theory that the issue of political apportionment is “nonjusticiable,” and thus beyond the authority of the Supreme Court to rectify. Nonetheless, the majority opinion, written by Roberts and joined by the other four conservatives then on the court, noted that “excessive partisanship in districting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust” because it is “incompatible with democratic principles.” Moreover, the majority added, “Our conclusion does not condone excessive partisan gerrymandering.” That was then. Late last month, in Louisiana v. Callais, the same five justices, now reinforced by Barrett, bestowed a seal of approval on “legitimate” partisan gerrymandering, used as a reason to eliminate a majority-Black congressional district, mapped under the Voting Rights Act. So in the space of seven years — which is not long in judicial time — the court’s conservatives went from lamenting the injustice of partisan gerrymanders as unfortunately beyond their reach, to endorsing what they blithely called “a target partisan distribution of voters” as a sacrosanct state prerogative. In a biting dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, observed that the majority had given “politicians free rein to adopt partisan gerrymanders” as “an excuse for stripping minority citizens of their voting rights.” Or as UCLA law professor Richard Hasen put it, “the odious practice has now become a defense in a voting rights case.” It did not take long for Southern states to get the message. Within days, the governor of Louisiana suspended a congressional primary, in which voting had already started, so that the Republican dominated legislature could purge a Black majority district from its electoral map. In Tennessee, the Republican-controlled legislature carved the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, centered in Memphis, into three slices, each one engulfed by a surrounding white district. The speaker of the Tennessee General Assembly bragged that the new map, enabled by the Supreme Court’s approval of partisan redistricting, is now “colorblind,” which evidently means all white. Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi are said to have similar proposals already in the works for this year, and Georgia for after 2026. There was a time when the Supreme Court rejected euphemisms and looked at the inequitable practices hidden by various obfuscations. Relatively antiseptic phrases such as “separate but equal,” “racial integrity” and “grandfather clause” were eventually recognized as refined cover-ups for racism. We have evidently come full circle, with the Supreme Court itself ratifying a so-called color-blind rationale for eviscerating minority voting rights in a manner that had not been seen for more than 60 years. So yes, take Barrett’s perceptive advice for identifying partisan hacks. Read the opinions and look for the political gerrymander through-line. Is Callais (written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Roberts) continuous with Rucho (written by Roberts and joined by Alito) on any discernable principle other than partisan advantage? An Emersonian foolish consistency may well be the “hobgoblin of small minds,” but that has not stopped the Supreme Court’s conservatives from closely adhering to one constant objective: Make Republicans win. Steven Lubet is the Williams Memorial Professor Emeritus at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.