This is something that most TAPPED readers are intuitively aware of, but I strongly recommend looking at the data contained in this Times piece about the Court's trajectory. There's an observable asymmetry on the Court, which contains four of the most consistently reactionary justices since World War II and has no liberal comparable to Willam Brennan or Thurgood Marshall. And while on the current Court it makes very little difference whether you have a Marshall clone or another Stephen Breyer, as the configuration of the Court changes, it may matter a great deal. Imagine if Robert Bork had been confirmed by the Senate: Antonin Scalia, rather than Anthony Kennedy, would be the median vote on the Court. The biggest reason to be concerned about Elena Kagan's nomination is that she seems unlikely to reverse this trend.
Which brings us to another point: No matter what Stuart Taylor and Ann Althouse may have told you, the data indicates that Roberts and Alito are every bit as conservative as Scalia and only marginally less conservative than Thomas. And I actually think that this kind of data, if anything, understates how practically conservative Bush's appointments are. If you were to throw out cases like Redding -- where Roberts and Alito added superfluous votes to the narrower opinion of a liberal coalition and Thomas issued a solo dissent -- and focused only on cases in which a more conservative justice cast a potentially decisive vote with some more liberal members of the Court, I'd bet that Alito and Roberts would show up as easily the most conservative votes.
--Scott Lemieux
