The Court Loses Its Chief Pragmatist

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

55% : Although it issued some polarized decisions along 6-3 partisan lines, most notably in a case limiting the Voting Rights Act, the Court also issued relatively narrow and nearly unanimous decisions, several written by Breyer himself, in cases that upheld the Affordable Care Act, protected the free-speech rights of students, and defended the religious-liberty rights of Catholic social-service agencies.
50% : It's fitting, therefore, that one of Breyer's most significant majority opinions for the Court emphasized the central connection between public schools and education for citizenship in American democracy.
49% : Or suppose you deeply think that at least some moves toward socialism are surely justified and will help," he told the NCC students.
45% : It ended with appendices showing the numbers of death sentences and executions from 1977 to 2014, year-by-year percentages of the U.S. population living in states that had recently conducted an execution, and maps showing the U.S. counties that administer the death penalty.
42% : But, as Breyer recognized, any consensus seems very fragile as the Court takes on the most-polarizing issues, such as abortion, gun rights, and affirmative action, where the justices are less open to persuasion.
41% : " At the oral argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, in cautioning his colleagues about the danger of overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Breyer read aloud, with great emphasis, the following sentence from the Court's decision: "To overrule under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason, to reexamine a watershed decision, would subvert the Court's legitimacy beyond any serious question.
40% : This term, however, in its pitched battles over abortion, gun rights, vaccine mandates, and now affirmative action, the Court has risked dividing 6-3 in precisely the way that Breyer tried to avoid.
30% : The other favorite opinion he listed was his 41-page dissent in Glossip v. Gross, a 2015 death-penalty case in which Breyer argued that "almost 40 years of studies, surveys and experience strongly indicate" that the death penalty cannot be administered in a way consistent with the Constitution.
30% : Breyer's opinion identified three fundamental constitutional defects of the death penalty -- "(1) serious unreliability, (2) arbitrariness in application, and (3) unconscionably long delays that undermine the death penalty's penological purpose."

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.