“In 2018 just after he announced his retirement, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who sat at the ideological center of the court for much of his 30-year tenure, met with a groups of reporters. Was he worried that some of the precedents he helped establish–the right to abortion and LGBT rights, for instance–might now be in jeopardy? No, he replied. He was confident that constitutional rights, once established would remain in place,” NPR reports.
“It took just four years, and the addition of one more Trump appointee to the Supreme Court, to prove him wrong.”
FiveThirtyEight: “The data emphasizes that the court is deeply polarized along partisan lines — perhaps more than it’s ever been. There have always been ideological disagreements among the justices, and those have often pitted liberals against conservatives, but those divides weren’t consistently linked to the justice’s appointing party.”
