The Supreme Court's most recent appointees agree more often than everyone else:
It can be treacherous to predict a justice's path based on early service, and presidents have been disappointed by the positions their nominees take when they reach the bench.
But this year, the four youngest justices separated neatly into the court's ideological wings and then presented a unified front.
Obama’s choices, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, agreed 94 percent of the time this term, according to statisticians at SCOTUSblog.com. The only pair that agreed more were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., Bush’s picks, who parted ways in only 4 percent of the court’s decisions.
I'm interested to hear Scott Lemieux's take on this. Lemieux has often argued that from a liberal point of view, Roberts and Alito are far worse than Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, because the latter have firmly held ideological views that occasionally lead them to rule against Republican Party interests, while the former are reliable partisans. Might we now say something similar about Kagan and Sotomayor relative to Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg?
